All Good Things
by Obsidian Blade
Summary: Bulma yearns for her old place as an active member of the Z-team, but even a three-year gap may not be long enough to produce the sort of honed fighting machine she needs to do her part against the androids. ON HIATUS while the author exorcises her Warcraft writing demon.
1. Old Wishes

Friday rush hour jammed the West City roads from pavement to pavement. Drivers slouched behind their steering wheels, thwarted by the traffic lights, while throngs of pedestrians took advantage of the crush to make the road their own extra lane.

Through the chaos, Bulma Briefs marched with her nose in the air, her perm bobbing behind her like a separate entity. The coffee-brown lenses of her sunglasses failed to hide the fire in her eyes.

'You're lucky I stuck around at all,' she shot caustically over her shoulder. 'Half an hour waiting, Yamcha, do you _know_ what I could do in half an hour? An awful lot more than you managed, I bet!'

Instant regret. If it was possible to snipe words right out of the air, she would have. The silence prickled at her back and she lowered her head, scowling at the rickety wooden fence beside her to avoid looking at her boyfriend, who she knew hurried along a few paces behind her, picnic hamper over his arm.

She had wanted to smile when she saw him. Really, she _had_, but thirty minutes late? To their first date this week? He could hardly blame her for her temper over _that_ indiscretion. No one would.

She came to a gap in the fence, where a tree sprouted up between cracked paving slabs. A paper sign had been tacked to the last plank: 'Demolition site. Keep out.' Bulma ignored it. With a bitter grunt, she forced her way through.

Waist-high grass threaded with wildflowers grasped at her legs as she staggered out into the open. The place was exactly as she remembered: a square of land closed off from the rest of the world by the fence and the ivy-clad walls of an elderly tower block.

Seven storeys high, it was dwarfed by the tall, slim, modern structures the city had sprouted all around it. Plastic tape and red and white posters encircled its grimy walls like a hangman's noose.

Yes, it was ugly. As she adjusted her sunglasses and tilted back her head to look, she could even agree with the papers – it was a blight on the face of West City. But then the sunlight glanced off its mirrored windows, gilding the leaves of the grasping vines, and the abandoned land lit up like a meadow in summertime. The grunt of traffic was somehow muffled here.

'Looks like it's still the same old secret garden,' said Yamcha. He landed beside her, shielding his eyes against the gleam as he looked up at the doomed flats. 'Gonna miss it?'

Bulma glanced sidelong at him. His expression was warm, one brow raised, his mouth tilted in that roguish half-smile. He looked as though he had shaken off her stupid barb like it was nothing, and she knew how much effort that must have taken. The pinpricks of pain in her temples began to fade.

'Yeah,' she said, slipping her arm through his. 'Sure am.'

They were going to be fine. The notion crept around inside her skull as they flattened a place to sit in the grass, a bower of green curving up over their heads on all sides. _This_ was how easy love could be: trading jokes in the sunlight where no-one else could reach them. Side by side, their shoulders grazing, they undid the linen ties on the picnic basket.

'Ham salad baguette and a glass of red, please, waiter,' said Bulma, grinning.

One hand holding the basket shut, Yamcha gave her an apologetic look. 'Well, I would, but I think we're all out.'

She felt herself begin to frown. 'Yamcha, what-'

He cut her off by darting forward with that uncanny speed of his and snatching the hamper from the ground. Kneeling, he balanced it on one knee and opened it toward her. Bulma stared. It was full to the brim with shiny red fruit.

Yamcha's arrogant grin set her heart racing as he said grandly, if a little nervously, 'But how about a lifetime supply of strawberries?'

In all the world, he was the only one who would remember that silly first wish, the one she'd cast aside even before the dragon radar was complete. Years ago, back when his hair still desert-bandit long, they had lounged in the conservatory after escaping Pilaf's palace, cloudy glasses of her mother's lemonade clutched in their hands.

Bulma was nervous and excited all at once; she couldn't get her mouth to shut up. Her first gulp of lemonade was the first chance he'd had to speak in hours.

'World domination and riches, though,' said Yamcha, stretching back against floral print cushions. 'Man, I guess when you can wish for anything you just fall back on the same overused goals. What was it you were going to wish for, anyway?'

Bulma flushed pink across her cheeks, peering up at him through her lashes. 'Well, I wanted a super-cute boyfriend, so I didn't exactly miss out.' But, oh god, was that too much? Too soppy, too needy, too lame? 'Lifetime supply of strawberries!' she blurted, gaze dipping to the ground. 'Originally I was going to wish for a... lifetime supply... of strawberries...'

Her first romantic comment and she'd ruined it. Utterly ruined. Blue in the face, her jaw so tense it hurt, she chanced a look up at him, the look of pity she knew he'd be wearing already etched in her mind's eye.

But Yamcha was blushing, his gaze aimed awkwardly over her left shoulder.

'Well, huh,' he mumbled, 'y'know, I'm, I'm the one who, uh.'

She felt her confidence returning, and with it her familiar cocky smirk. She leant toward him, head tilted to the side.

'Come on Yamcha, if you have something to say, say it.'

Abashed, Yamcha ran a hand through his hair, grinning nervously. Bulma's veins sang with a sudden shot of adrenaline. She sat further forward and nudged him in the arm.

'Come o-o-on, you can tell sweet lil me-e-e.'

He met her gaze awkwardly, his blush reaching right up to his hairline. 'Got someone super-cute.'

They had been goofy teens with cheesy lines, but even with a decade between then and now she felt the same warmth in her chest as she recalled those words. That was romance as she knew it should be: sweet compliments and silliness. An easy afternoon spent without distraction, just each other's company.

And here they were again, sharing an in-joke years old and relaxing in the sunshine. She would never find this sort of rapport with anyone else. She could never amass this sort of history.

'Two wishes in one. That makes you better than Shenron,' she said, and leant in to kiss him.

They were going to be fine.


	2. Kame House

'You said I'd be a liability!'

Bulma glared over Oolong's head at Kame-Sen'nin. With his napkin tucked into the collar of his garish Hawaiian shirt, the old master paused with a fistful of dried fish halfway to his mouth. His white brows shifted as he glanced over at her beneath his sunglasses.

'I said we'd get in everyone else's way, if you want to be pedantic about it,' he said.

'Oh, come on,' she said. 'The point is, if you were _that_ worried when the Saiyans were here you'll want to bench _everyone_ in this room when the androids show their faces. And that's not right.'

'Hey.'

Oolong elbowed her in the floating rib. Bulma glared down at him.

'What, pig?'

'Eesh.' He wrinkled his snout. 'I was just gonna say, us being benched is no biggie with the alien brigade on our side, that's all.'

'It is too! This is earth. Earthlings should defend it.'

She spread her ire across the group at large. A heroic cooking effort by Krillin and Yamcha had covered every available inch of the table with pots and bowls. A frying pan inexplicably full of soup lurked amongst them. Serving ladles stood upright in mounds of steamed vegetables, noodles, prawns and anything else unlucky enough to have fallen into Bulma's cart during her harried trip around the supermarket. Her friends slouched behind each dish with their plates in their laps.

Yamcha himself sat to her left, his mouth too full of rice to do much more than nod his agreement. Puar idled on the closed lid of the dumpling pot, eyes down. The turtle peered out from behind an untouched stack of tempura prawns, flustered. It was Krillin, balancing his plate on his knee to her right, who met Bulma's irritation with a conciliatory smile.

'We've all been training hard,' he said. 'When we're needed, we'll get our shot. No sweat, right?'

'That's not-' she tried to say, but Muten Roshi cut her off.

'It's about knowing your limits, Bulma.'

He paused to wash down the last of his fish with a swig of beer, but Bulma refrained from interjecting. She knew that tone. It meant she might actually get something meaningful out of the old pervert.

'Everyone here witnessed the great power both Son Goku and that lad from the future possess,' he said. 'Personally, I can't imagine how strong that makes our androids. Training is going fantastically, but there's a fair chance our hopes will be resting on our resident aliens. I think we should be grateful we have them, rather than fighting over who does what.'

Grateful? Of course she was grateful. Bulma scowled. She was a grateful sort of person.

She speared a carrot viciously, nearly flipping her plate over into Oolong's lap. 'Don't you get how belittling that is? It sounds like you think humanity should stand aside. How many times have we saved the world in the past? Besides,' she said, taking a bite of the carrot and stopping to chew, head held high, 'with my genius and good looks, I know _my_ contribution will be invaluable.'

'And if nothing else, we can always squash 'em with her ego,' she heard Krillin stage-whisper knowingly to the turtle at the back.

As she hurled a rice ball at his head the group fell back into laughter. The conversation rolled toward adventure, aerobics, baseball, bodily harm and voyeurism, the usual rule settled firmly in place: if it can't be fixed, forget all about it.

But Bulma couldn't forget. After dinner came dessert, only for Roshi to reveal he'd chowed down on the last of the ice cream, leaving them with empty bowls and an opened packet of naked chocolate flakes. The dusty bottle of champagne Krillin had stored away to celebrate his first date made a fine substitute. With each chocolate stick and glass of bubbly, Bulma shifted closer to Yamcha on the cushions.

As their friends drifted off in front of the television, she became increasingly aware of the warm throb of Yamcha's pulse beneath her forehead and the relaxed slopes of his muscles under his shirt. When Krillin headed to the toilet, leaving the two of them amongst the sleepers, the couple's make-out session was short but passionate, heated by their closeness and the nostalgia she always felt at Kame House.

Bulma tired of waiting for Krillin to re-emerge at about the same time Yamcha dozed off beneath her. She slipped from under his arm and snagged her coat from the hook by the door, thrusting her feet into a battered pair of someone else's training boots and stepping outside.

It took her three seconds to get her hood up, and that was three seconds too long. Rain drove straight through her curls and dribbled down the back of her scalp; the wind lashed her in the face with her own plastic sleeve; and her mascara beaded on her eyelashes for all its claims of being waterproof.

Cursing vehemently, she shoved her hair away as best she could and kicked the door shut behind her. She had completely forgotten about the storm: chatter, drink and the condensation blanketing the windows had hidden it away. It had been nothing more than a light shower when she and Yamcha first arrived in her hover jet, but clearly it had grown since then. The puddles on the front steps weren't just rainwater, they were ringed with salty foam. The sea must have reached all the way up to the door. Apparently champagne and crass humour could drown out anything.

She glared skyward through the deluge, up to the thunderhead glowering on the horizon. It flexed grey slabs of cloud, bullying the sea into flurries of froth, and blue lightning crackled for a split second back toward her. She counted slowly. Even as her earlier outburst drew to the forefront of her mind, the steady numbers soothed her until a deafening retort boomed overhead. Nine.

Nine miles and heading away, if the slant of the palm tree was anything to go by. Bulma wasn't especially afraid of storms anyway. For her perm's battered honour alone, she flicked two fingers in the cloud's direction before crunching across the beach to the irritable line of the surf.

She sat, and the wet sand pressed coolly against her through her jacket. She wrinkled her nose, kicking at the sea as it crept up around her heels.

No matter what Roshi said, she was not going to sit this one out. It was bad enough that her muscle-brained fighter friends had refused to let her deactivate the androids in advance; they couldn't expect to shelve her altogether.

Just the thought of it swelled her chest with indignation. She snorted steam at the sky. She was the _backbone_ of their group. _Her _adventure had pulled Goku away from his non-life as some sort of monkey hermit. _She_ was the one whose fantastic mind bound Oolong to their cause, and it was _her_ beauty that turned Yamcha around too. She had designed the dragon radar, she and her dad built the space ship, she and her capsules had provided shelter and transportation. They _needed_ her.

'Had enough of the lech brigade, huh?'

Bulma jumped, head jerking around with a crackle of static from her hood. Krillin was standing at the foot of the steps, wearing an apologetic smile and what looked like her own blue and white pumps. Now she knew whose boots she'd borrowed, at least.

'Hey, if I couldn't handle a bit of oogling I wouldn't have come,' she retorted, turning back to the sea.

He strolled over to her, stopping at her side, and opened an umbrella.

'Here.'

'Keep it, I'm thinking.'

'Thanks for the thanks,' he said, feigning hurt, and sat heavily beside her. 'Tonight's made me feel like a real man. Can't offer a friend shelter, can't save the world...'

'You're thinking about it too,' she said sharply.

He nodded, regarding her seriously.

'I thought as much,' said Bulma. 'You can't spend your whole life adventuring against evil and just stop. I mean, you're a warrior, doesn't it get you right in your warrior pride that you might become some sort of reserve team?'

'What makes you think that's going to happen?'

'Weren't you listening to Roshi? Best just leave it _all _to Goku.'

'That wasn't what-'

'And okay, okay, Goku's always been our big hero, but we were important too. Monkey boy wouldn't have gotten anywhere without us.' She hunched her shoulders. 'And then along came _Namek_.'

'Is this about us leaving you in that cave?' he asked, wincing. 'Because I'm still pretty sorry about that.'

'You know what? It _is_ about that cave,' said Bulma. 'But I wasn't the only one left sitting around: what about you and Gohan? You were stuck hiding half the time too, and if I have my facts straight about that fight with Frieza, you didn't get to put many dents in him either.'

'That's because we had to, Bulma. Sure, I want my shot against the bad guys, but if they're too much for me... that's it.' He shrugged.

'See? That really sucks.'

'Actually, it's kinda just common sense.'

'Taking a back seat; letting someone else do it; not getting to help your friends; becoming some sort of disposable, unimportant thing to be left behind...' She trailed off as Krillin's face twisted in awkward concern. 'What?'

'You know how important you were in wishing back Yamcha and the others, right?' he said, frowning.

She crossed her arms. 'Oh yeah, so important that all you guys did was leave me behind.'

'Come on, Bulma!' He clapped her shoulder and she glowered sulkily. 'We couldn't even reach Namek without your spaceship. And our biggest advantage out there was being able to sense more than the bad guys. That's ki from Gohan and me... and the dragon balls too, thanks to your dragon radar.' He raised a brow. 'Since when have you needed anyone to say that, huh?'

Bulma huffed, scooping up a handful of sand and throwing it at the waves. An uncomfortable heat swelled in her throat and against her temples. She shook her head.

'Since I spent the whole time in a cave, Krillin,' she said. 'A stupid cave. What sort of adventure is that?'

Krillin gave her a sceptical look, shifting the umbrella against his shoulder.

'I thought this was about being able to save your friends.'

'That's... that's a side effect of a good adventure,' she said, shrugging dismissively and lowering her gaze to her nails.

'Well,' said Krillin, 'I guess we've cracked why you're the one who's het up about this...'

'And just what does that mean?'

She gave him her harshest glare, head held high and haughty, but Krillin met her gaze unperturbed.

'I mean... it's all down to accepting your limits, okay? You're a scientist, not a fighter. Some things are just going to be too dangerous for you to throw yourself into personally.'

'Gero's a scientist,' she said. 'I don't see him sitting this out.'

'Yeah... he's also the bad guy, Bulma.'

She huffed. 'What difference does that make?'

He eyed her sidelong for a second, before shrugging. 'I don't think he's doing this for a sense of adventure either. He's not coming to fight us himself, he's sending robots instead. Maybe you should... I don't know, invent some sort of android crushing machine.'

Bulma rolled her eyes. 'Real inspiring, Krillin.'

He grinned, raising his hands in defeat. 'Hey, I'm not the genius here!'

'Oh, you've got that right.'

Their chatter petered out, leaving the pair in silence on the shore, watching the storm stretch across the horizon like a spreading barricade. Krillin's points were probably solid, Bulma decided with some resentment, but only to him and others like him. It wasn't breaking news that she kept the bulk of the group's combined ambition all to herself. Goku, Krillin and Yamcha worked hard, it was true, but they always seemed comfortable with whatever progress they'd made. She couldn't recall ever witnessing one of them work toward a more specific target than simply 'stronger.'

Of course, Bulma Briefs was a different beast altogether. She needed a project, a planned trajectory, a big _something_. And in the back of her head, Krillin's 'real inspiring' suggestion began to tick.


	3. Vegeta's Commission

**ALL GOOD THINGS****  
**by Obsidian Blade

2.

When she woke at quarter to five in the morning, Bulma had to concede that her lab was a mess. Paper had been taped, tacked or stacked on every surface, with equations and brainstorms scrawled over each sheet. The much-abused menu of her favourite takeaway fluttered in circles near the ceiling, caught on a blade of the overhead fan. Beside the prices for egg fried rice and chilli con carne, a list of testing methods started simple with 'computer simulation' and veered toward dangerous with 'throw it at Vegeta'.

She had dragged her mother's walnut coffee table into the lab late last night, just as an extra surface. It squatted between two of her long steel workbenches with an abandoned mug of tea playing paperweight at its centre.

Bulma picked her way over to it. A grey skein of milk bobbing at the top of the tea deterred her from trying it cold, but she lifted the mug anyway to snag a sheaf of papers beneath. It was a list of missing parts. Glancing between each item and the clutter, she tallied up how many hours it would take to get the lab ready for her to resume work. Far more than she was willing to spend. Redirecting her early morning enthusiasm, she turned on her heel.

Her father would be awake. She favoured nine o'clock starts; he preferred nine o'clock bedtimes and started early to make up for lost time. They'd brushed shoulders as early as four in the morning before, when she was staggering to bed after a late night and he was considering breakfast.

This dawn rendition of the house was his. The light was dusky lilac, threaded with pale gold as the sun edged over the sharp city skyline. From the road came the occasional swish of a passing car driving through the puddles left behind by last night's storm, but inside everything was so quiet Bulma could hear the crinkle of the carpet under her feet.

She hummed to compensate and thudded noisily down the stairs. That was the other thing missing, she realised: the smell of her mother's waffles. The floral scent the nocturnal cleaning bots had left behind wasn't _bad_ necessarily, but it didn't promise breakfast.

Detouring through the kitchen, she elbowed open the fridge, snagged a yoghurt and downed it in one. The pot landed amongst the legion of empty bacon wrappers rallying at the bottom of the bin. Her attention shifted temporarily to the coffee machine, but she shrugged off the urge. Today she was up early, she was inspired, she was going to Get Things Done – without chemical props – because she was a genius, and that was that.

Head held high, she stepped out through the French doors and crossed the garden, past her mother's roses and a wide section of flattened grass where Yamcha tended to train. The hangers loomed ahead a safe distance from the house. She could see the light shining through the blinds of Dr Briefs' office at the back of the building.

She wondered if she would have to be subtle about this. Her father wasn't the interfering sort: he hadn't stopped her hunting for dragon balls at sweet sixteen; the most he'd done when the compound was flooded with Nameks was to insist on shaking all their hands; and he didn't seem to have noticed Vegeta was living with them at all.

Not that she could blame him about the last one. She hadn't seen the saiyan since Goku's return nearly a month ago. She glanced absently back at the house, up to Vegeta's first floor window. The curtains were drawn as usual, and she saw no sign of a light on inside.

She shook her head. Anyway. Subtle. She would do that. Her father might have been liberal in the past, but if there was ever a time he might try to belatedly assert some authority it would probably be now, when his only daughter was set to put herself in the sights of two mass-murdering androids.

She tapped his security code into the pad beside the back door – K-I-T-T-Y – and sauntered into the hanger. A circle of capsule spaceships, all based on the one Goku had taken to Namek, squatted on the cement floor in the centre of the vast space. One of them had several broken panels pulled away from its side. Its stark interior was largely hidden in the shadows, but a fibrous umbilical cord of wires and tubes trailed out of it and across to a number of tanks half-covered with a tarpaulin. Clearly her father was working on some kind of upgrade.

At the moment, though, it sounded like he was on the phone. She strode purposefully past the ships and toward his door. Yes, that was definitely his voice, ponderous and slightly quizzical as always. Trust her father to find someone to chat with at dawn.

'You can call them back,' she announced loudly, throwing open the door and striding through.

She managed one step before the door rebounded and smacked her in the side of the face. Squawking, she staggered shoulder-first into the wall. For a few seconds surprise plugged her throat; she looked around wide-eyed, taking in her bookish father casually smoking away behind his desk and then the arrogant countenance of Vegeta as he observed her utter humiliation. He was back in his battered battlesuit, but neither the gaping hole over his midsection nor the smaller burn over his heart managed to subdue the proud disdain in his black eyes.

'I think perhaps you should have knocked, dear,' said her father, unperturbed, and suddenly her throat was free again.

'Just what do you think you're doing, huh?' She straightened up, fluffing her hair, and shot Vegeta her most venomous glare. 'Deliberately trying to hit me! I know what you warriors are like, you could tell I was coming, you could have moved out of the way, but no, no, wouldn't want to miss the chance to deck a beautiful lady in the face with a doorknob-'

'When I want you dead,' Vegeta interrupted, 'I won't bother with intermediary objects.'

'Don't you threaten me in my own house,' Bulma snapped back. 'I don't see you in months and this is how you say hello? Don't you have any manners?'

'As though I have any interest in earthling niceties.'

'Now then,' said Dr Briefs, deftly cutting off Bulma's tart reply, 'how about I finish telling you about the gravity machine, son?'

The saiyan scoffed at the diminutive but let it slide.

'Acceptable,' he said.

Curiosity sharpened Bulma's anger to a focused point. _Temporarily_ she cut away the mass of insults she had ready for Vegeta.

'Hold it,' she said instead, glaring at her father. 'Gravity machine?'

'You're welcome to listen in, dear,' he said, as though that excused and explained everything. He turned back to Vegeta. 'On paper the generator is up to scratch. A damn sight better than up to scratch, actually; I'm starting to think it could go as high as five hundred times earth's gravity, but then you'd never want to turn it up that much anyway, you'd end up flat like a pancake.'

'Unlikely,' said the warrior sourly, even as Bulma boggled at the numbers. 'I will endure whatever your petty machines can produce. Explain the problem. You specified "on paper". Why?'

'It's the existing ship, I'm afraid. The hull just can't take that kind of pressure. It starts to buckle at the two hundred mark.'

'Because it was _designed_ for space travel, not crazy alien masochism,' Bulma said sharply, setting her hands on her hips.

She highly doubted Vegeta had properly considered what all this really meant: her father's gravity generator could create a force more demanding than the exertions of space travel. Lift off, re-entry, crash-landing, freezing temperatures, extreme heat, the strain of _not exploding_ in a vacuum, the whole dang caboodle. And here was Vegeta, looking to submit his mortal bloody coil to that force.

Her father nodded absently. 'That's the truth of it.'

Vegeta's demanding stare never faltered. 'What are you doing to fix it?'

'Well, I guess the best I can do right now is close up the current model and give you that,' said Dr Briefs, pawing through the top drawer of his desk for a new pack of cigarettes.

'Not good enough,' Vegeta replied. 'I asked for three times the level Kakarott trained under.'

'Weren't you listening?' said Bulma irritably. She threw her lighter to her dad before tossing back her head and eyeing Vegeta down her nose. 'He said that's the best he can give you.'

'Bulma dear, you're not helping.' Dr Briefs gave the saiyan a pacifying glance. It had no visible effect on the prince's evident malcontent. 'The new shell will take another week no matter what we do with the current model, son. You may as well have it so you can build up your strength in the meantime. Two hundred is much closer to three hundred than one, after all.'

'I'm aware of simple mathematics, old man.' Vegeta glared over the doctor's shoulder for a few seconds more before giving an arrogant huff. 'Fine. Bring it to me within the hour.'

He turned on his heel and strode out of the door, slamming it behind him. Bulma huffed, fluffing her hair. She sat in the chair opposite her father's desk.

'What a jerk,' she muttered.

'He's just eager to get to work, daughter,' said Dr Briefs. 'I admire his determination. Still think he'll crush himself within the week, of course, but we'll see.'

Bulma folded her list of components and set it aside for the time being. She leant forward over the desk and gave her father her best serious look. 'About that. Dad. You're making a gravity room for Vegeta?'

'Mhm,' he said.

She paused for a second, and when he made no move to elaborate she spread her fingers. 'Why?'

'Well, mostly because he asked me to, daughter,' he said simply. 'Working the gravity generator into Goku's ship was interesting enough, and he's asking for a much more powerful version. You know how difficult it is to turn down a project like that one. Besides, he seems like a very dedicated young man. That sort of resolve deserves reward. Oh,' he paused to light his cigarette, 'and I want to keep him away from my womenfolk.'

Bulma stared. 'Your "womenfolk".'

He looked at her over the black plastic rims of his glasses, deadpan. 'I have noticed the way he looks at your mother.'

She rolled her eyes, more than used to Pansy's antics. 'With disbelief and mild horror, Dad? She might think he's hot stuff, but I can assure you he's not interested.'

Dr Briefs shrugged, leaning back in his chair and taking a long drag on his smoke. 'I believe the other points stand, though, don't they.'

'Very weakly,' she relented. 'I still don't see why you cut me out of the project.'

'You need to focus more on the company, Bulma,' he said, 'not on personal ventures. I can't run Capsule Corporation forever, you know.'

Bulma blinked, blindsided by this sudden change of tack. 'What?'

'You need to get used to the business of it all,' he said.

She drew herself up, crossing her arms. 'I already am used to it, Dad! Paperwork, paperwork, yadda yadda.'

'Mm, yes,' he agreed, blowing a shapeless cloud of smoke at the ceiling. 'That's why all the documentation I sent you about the newest exhaust designs for the capsule cars is still sitting on your desk a week on, I'm sure.'

She felt her face and neck flush, thinking of the mounds of paper that had since accumulated on top. 'Fine. I'll go and do that. But,' she unfolded her list and pushed it across the desk toward him, 'I need these parts.'

Her father reviewed the list with his usual expression of dislocated interest.

'Hm, I do have a few of these in storage, yes, and I can certainly order in that chip quickly enough... What is it all for?'

She gave a sassy toss of her head. 'A little personal project. But hey, Dad, you know how difficult it is to turn down a big idea. So let's just get me the parts and I'll get it all done and out of the way. Right?'

She leant forward in her chair, fixing him with a challenging sneer. There was no way he was taking away her fun, not when she had drive like this; the whole idea that she was somehow _slacking_ at her duties within the company was ridiculous. She would stare him down, she would make him comply, no matter what it took.

'Of course, daughter dearest,' said her father pleasantly. 'I'll call the parts in when the factory wakes up in an hour or so. In the meantime I think I'll get on with these schematics, if you don't mind.'

'I...' She trailed off, finding herself unexpectedly faced with Dr Brief's usual docile self. Slowly she stood. 'Okay then. Thanks, Dad.'

'It's my pleasure, Bulma,' he said.

For a moment she hesitated, sensing some sort of loophole she might have missed. When nothing came to mind, she decided to be happy she had, eventually, got what she wanted, and made to leave.

The doctor waited until the door was about to shut before adding, 'And daughter dearest, don't forget the documents.'


	4. Genius Zen

Right! Uni is DONE, _Devilry_ is DONE, it's time to get weekly updates on the go. With any luck I'll have this fic done before the next big upheaval: movin' house. Oh life, you are a tumultuous thing. ;p Thank you to everyone for your wonderful reviews, you make me the happiest Sidian in the universe.

* * *

**ALL GOOD THINGS****  
**by Obsidian Blade

3.

The subpar gravity machine was up and running within the hour. Bulma could hear its steady thrum from her bedroom, where she had set up camp to avoid the mess in her lab. The sound had been distracting at first, a bothersome reminder of her exclusion from the project, but she was a mechanic at heart. She couldn't help the excited skip of her heart at the purr of an engine: a new, groundbreaking one at that.

After a short while of straining her ears through the wall, she had set herself up on the balcony, where she could hear every detail of the guttural whirr. Sunglasses in place, a glass of beer at her side and the schematics for her new project in her lap, Bulma was in a state of bliss. She kicked her feet up on the railing and sketched out the thick-set leg of an armoured suit beside a crude biro blueprint for the central motherboard. The success of the suit's predecessor – fighting crabs _in the ocean _– made this new project a sure success, she had no doubt. Alright, the last one had been a submersible, but if she modified the jets she could probably get it to fly, and then…

Movement in the monitor settled on the floor beside her caught Bulma's eye. Her laboratory gleamed in the tiny view screen. It looked considerably less like a bombsite now than it had three hours earlier. The grainy likeness of Mrs. Briefs tottered around the long benches in her high heels, an enormous stack of papers in one arm and a Tupperware box clasped under the other.

Bulma stared. 'Mother! You can't use cookies as paperweights!'

Her mother tittered, smoothing out a few blueprints on the nearest desk and topping them with a double chocolate chip.

'Oh, Bulma,' she said, her voice distorted through the intercom, 'don't you worry. There are muffins too!'

'Well you can't use muffins either! Stop that!'

'Of course I can, sweetness,' said Mrs. Briefs. 'This room is going to smell so good!'

When she had first begged her mother to help clear up the mess that was her lab, Bulma had honestly thought it was one of the few tasks the older Briefs couldn't give a bizarre twist. She hated being wrong.

'It'll be distracting. It'll ruin my… my _genius zen._'

She spread her arms in a loose imitation of one of Yamcha's fighting stances and accidentally punted her beer with her elbow. It disappeared over the edge of the balcony. Two seconds later, she winced at the crash down below.

'Don't you worry, my baby,' said her mother. 'I've got it all planned out. Your father and I both know how much you hate office work. If I put lovely sweet things on all the nasty papers you'll have a wonderful incentive to go around getting things done.'

Bulma gaped. '_What_? Do you and Dad think I just don't do any work at all?'

'Of course not, dear.' She plucked a blueberry muffin from her box and set it atop a stack of fiscal planning sheets. 'You're very dedicated to the things you're interested in. We're both so proud of you.'

'The things I'm–'

She spun away from the screen with a plastic creak of protest from her rainbow-coloured deckchair. Pinching the bridge of her nose, she took a deep breath and counted to ten.

'Fine. Thank you. Mother. That will be _all_,' she ground out, sparing the cheery face of Mrs. Briefs a glance before she reached over and turned off the monitor. Frankly, she didn't want to wait and see if her mother was intending on bringing out the vanilla frosting.

Wound up and scowling, she turned her attention back to her work. It was shoddy. She could see a million errors already: how many fighters were so _egg-shaped_, for example, and with fingers that short how was she ever going to make a proper fist?

Calculated sweeps of her pen sliced off extra weight and laid open slow-turning joints in the body of the suit, while her eyes shifted back to the motherboard and proceeded to tear that apart. It had to be resilient, able to weather power surges and utilise endless backup relays; it had to react without delay; and it had to be ten times better than anything the mind behind the androids could possibly dream up. Currently it was not. She had to do a much better job of minimising the chance of a direct impact to the primary systems, so it would need to be smaller. Maybe if she–

'Damnit mother.'

Cookies and muffins overwhelmed any thoughts of upgrades. Her mother made fantastic treacle biscuits; she could always drop by the lab for proper paper, perhaps, and pick up some of the incentives Mrs. Briefs had left sitting around. It wouldn't waste too much time, after all, and it would end this newfound distraction.

'So… did it have to be right there?'

She blinked and looked up. Yamcha stood over her, balancing on the balcony railing with a grin on his face, one brow arched. Seeing her confusion, he spread one arm down toward the grass. She looked over at the humming spaceship-turned-gravity chamber and realised it was right where he usually went through his morning stretches.

'I guess Dad saw the flattened grass and figured hey presto,' she said, shrugging.

'That does sound like him,' said Yamcha. He leapt down from the railing and lounged back next to her on the deckchair, which gave an ominous creak. 'What is that thing, anyway? Vegeta sure seems to be going hell for leather in there.'

'I'll bet,' Bulma said, frowning. 'It's a gravity simulator. I don't know the specifics because _apparently_ I'm not wanted working on the interesting stuff.'

She heard his nervous chuckle at the clear edge to her voice and glanced up in time to see his apologetic grin.

'So,' he said, 'that's stopped you? Sounds like a first, Bulma.'

She blinked. 'You know what, Yamcha? You're right. It's not sane, keeping a mind like mine off a project that big.' She stood up, folding her sketches and lodging them in her waistband, hidden under her shirt.

'Let's go take a look, then,' said Yamcha, offering her his arm.

Together they jumped over the railing, his ki steadying them on the way down, and landed on the grass. The hum of the machine was even louder down here; Bulma could feel the vibrations in the soles of her feet. Pushing back a stray curl, she took a step forward before Yamcha stopped her with a hand on her arm.

'Let's be discreet,' he said, frowning slightly at the ship's nearest window. 'I think he'll be pretty pissed if we disturb him.'

'You mean sneak?' said Bulma. She waved a hand dismissively. 'Come on, Yamcha, he'll know we're there anyway. How could anyone _not_ realise they were within twenty metres of a babe like me, huh?'

'I guess you can't hide your power level,' Yamcha conceded, letting her go.

The ship was only subtlety different from the others. It was spherical, painted black and white in bands with the company label emblazoned on the side, and it braced itself on the lawn with four retractable legs. The real change was all internal, but Bulma had to admit there was something spooky about the blood red light spilling out through the windows. Their faces lit up crimson, she and Yamcha stood on their tiptoes below the shuddering glass and peered inside.

It hurt her eyes to focus on anything in there. It all seemed to jump and quaver under the force of the gravity, enough to blur every straight line. The thick central pillar was the only thing standing steady. Bulma craned her neck until she could make out the display: 40.

'Hey, that's pretty low,' said Yamcha from beside her.

'Only compared to what he wants to knock it up to,' Bulma said, frowning. 'I don't know about Vegeta, but at forty times earth's gravity I'd weigh just over two tonnes. I'm surprised he's standing at all.'

The two of them looked back to the window. On the other side, Vegeta struggled through the series of crunches and stretches Bulma had occasionally witnessed him doing just before dawn. She had only ever spared him a short glance on her way to bed, but there was no missing the radical difference between the smooth, controlled movements he maintained out on the grass and the strained, shaking motions he was managing now. Every muscle in his stocky frame bulged under the exertion, his tendons taut beneath his skin.

'It makes sense that he wants it to go higher,' said Yamcha.

'No,' said Bulma, 'it's _insane_ that he wants it to go higher.'

Yamcha raised his hands. 'Just hear me out. When I was on King Kai's planet in the otherworld, we trained at ten times normal gravity. That was an intense work out to start with, let me tell you, but once you get used to it… well, it feels normal.' He shrugged. 'Being able to turn it up again after that, that would help a lot.'

She scowled. 'Do you want to try it too, then? When Dad's finished you can turn it straight up to three hundred, and see how intense a workout you get _then_.'

Something flashed in the chamber before Yamcha could reply.

'What's he doing now?' she snapped, pressing her face back to the window.

A blue burst of ki hurtled around in circles inside the ship, so fast it hurt her eyes to track. Instead, she looked to Vegeta, but he seemed nonplussed. Brows drawn low and teeth bared, he stepped in and out of the ki ball's path a few times, before cursing audibly and firing another shot directly at it. She could see what he was trying to do: if the two blasts hit each other head on, they'd each fly a half-circle around the ship before colliding again and bouncing back. He'd have a much shorter time to dodge. Clearly he hadn't accounted for the gravity, however; the second blast struck the first on the underside and rebounded immediately. Vegeta had no time to move. The blast crashed into his chest, throwing him backward, and with the weight of forty times gravity behind him, he hit the floor with a terrifying crunch.

'Vegeta!' Bulma shrieked without thinking.

His head snapped around to face her, a roar of fury bursting from his chest.

'_What do you think you're looking at?_'

With superhuman strength he hauled himself upright. The first shot surged back around toward him, but at the last second he jerked his head to the side, out of the way, and smacked the ki ball directly in its centre as it streaked over his shoulder. Bulma barely had time to screech again before Yamcha snagged her by the collar and hauled her back: the ki ball punched straight through the window mere feet in front of them and tore up into the sky, shards of glass and twisted metal pelting down on the couple as they cowered on the grass.

The generator's thrum tapered out from inside the machine and the clunk and pitter-patter of debris slowed and ceased. Cautiously, Yamcha drew back from over her.

'Are you alright, Bulma?'

She slowly uncurled from her crouch.

'I-I think so. That was… so close, I mean, our heads were right there and he- he fired right…'

The door to the ship hissed open and Vegeta stepped out, bloodied and dusty. He stopped and eyed them both with utter distaste.

'_You fired right at us_!' Bulma jumped to her feet and stormed toward him. 'You could have taken our heads off! I give you a place to stay and you give me this? You try to murder me? Do you have any bloody manners at–'

Vegeta growled furiously and a crackling blue bloom of ki surged up from around him and out. It smacked straight into Bulma, tiny electric shocks exploding all over her body before the air itself seemed to solidify against her and hurled her backward. She stumbled over her own feet, eyes wide, and sat down hard.

'Interrupt my training again,' Vegeta snarled, 'and I won't miss.'

His ki drew back in around him and he rocketed straight up into the sky. Within seconds he had disappeared amongst the clouds.

Yamcha gripped her shoulder.

'You shouldn't bait him, Bulma.'

Her fear didn't convert to fury quite as quickly the second time around, but she managed a shaky glare nevertheless.

'And you- you shouldn't just sit there and watch when he threatens me! Are you a warrior or what? He tried to- he tried to kill us.'

Yamcha massaged his face with one hand. 'You shouldn't sound so surprised, Bulma. Maybe he'll pull a Piccolo and surprise us all someday, end up firmly on our side like me and Tenshinhan, but in the meantime… the guy's still mean as anything.'

She scowled obstinately, folding her arms across her chest. 'You still could've done something.'

He tried a grin, but she didn't miss the way the corners of his mouth faltered short of the full stretch. 'Alright, next time I'll be your knight in shining armour, okay? I promise.'

Bulma eyed him for a second, before nodding her assent. 'Fine. You can start by helping me up, mister knight.' As she took his hand and let him draw her to her feet, she looked back to the blackened hole gaping in the side of the ship. 'Part of the problem was that the blast was flying in a static circle, wasn't it,' she said vaguely.

Yamcha blinked. 'Uh, sure. Dodging's not that hard when the shot's predictable. Under that sort of weight, though, it's probably a decent work out.' He glanced at her sideways as they walked back toward the house. 'Why?'

'Oh.' She shrugged one shoulder. 'Just thinking.'

She would need a decent training regimen. How else could she prepare her suit for war?


	5. Submersible Versus Saiyan

**ALL GOOD THINGS****  
**by Obsidian Blade

**4.**

Either the submersible was bulkier than Bulma remembered or her lab had stupidly low ceilings. Belted into the cockpit, hands locked around the steering grips, she focused on keeping the suit low as she stacked her work benches against the laboratory walls.

Crouching was difficult. The machine had been designed to function underwater; on land, its legs were perpetually bent at the knee under the sheer weight of the body alone. Its thick ankles had little give, and the body itself was a rigid sphere, incapable of bending at the waist.

The size of the viewport, too, was going to be an issue. She recalled the fascination with old submarines she and her father had entertained when they designed the suit; it was probably inevitable that they chose a tiny porthole off an old U-boat for a window. It meant she had no peripheral vision at all. She had to turn the whole suit to figure out where to put each bench. It seemed like a straightforwardly fatal defect for a combat suit to have.

Setting the last bench against the wall, she stepped back to admire her handiwork. With the long tables set aside, the middle of the lab had been transformed into a wide open space, ready to house stacks of mechanical parts. Most important of all, full-sized technical blueprints covered three drawing boards set against the far wall. Her biro sketches had come a long way in two weeks. The new design was sleeker. It had a wider windscreen, longer legs, a less cumbersome midsection, smarter joints and ridiculously, beautifully complex circuitry.

Her chest puffed up with pride at the sight. Damn, she was a genius. In fact, she was such a genius it didn't need saying. Her vast, fantastic intellect had spawned brilliant inventions for years, inventions that had brought her to the action time and time again. The dragon radar, her cars, her planes, her bikes, her boats. This very suit had broken the lull on Namek.

She knew it was her fault that lull had started in the first place, though. She had made a stupid mistake: she had accepted the back seat as some sort of necessity. She scowled at the thought. She had stopped _trying _to make a difference. It had been a shitty attempt to curb her ambition for the sake of _safety_ or some dross like that, and she could see Krillin and the others about to do themselves the same disservice. It wasn't up to her to fix their mindsets, of course, but she sure as hell wasn't settling into a submissive attitude herself. Her contribution was going to stop the androids in their tracks.

Before she set about carving up this version of the suit to make way for the awe-inspiring second generation, though, she figured it would be wise to see what it could do. Spending too much time dealing with the theoretical was never a good idea, after all.

In the centre of the room, she adopted one of Yamcha's battle stances as best she could. She couldn't dip any lower thanks to the suit's over-worked knees and her metal fingers scraped together as she tried to form a fist, but it was a good enough approximation in her eyes, arms raised and body turned side-on. It did mean she couldn't technically _see_ her opponent thanks to the wall of the cockpit, but could any of her fighter friends see the enemy when they were shadow boxing? She highly doubted it.

What next, then? Probably a kick. She paused to tighten the straps over her shoulders. There was no point in starting easy: best go straight for a head-height blow. She clenched the grips, pressed a button, and – raised the suit's foot a whole three centimetres off the ground before the entire thing toppled backward.

The suit lurched around her, shuddering as the joint in the weight-bearing knee jumped and locked. The leg wouldn't straighten. She wheeled her arms wildly as the floor tilted diagonally across her viewport, the machine cooed a warning 'oh dear' – did her father have to use her mother's voice for these things? – and Bulma let out a hysterical giggle as it dawned on her that she had lost her first duel. To gravity.

Something crunched overhead. The suit's left arm caught – in the wires that suspended the lights, she realised. The cable stopped the slow-motion collapse of her so-called war machine and Bulma let out a whistling breath of relief.

Fleeting relief. Something strained overhead; plaster bounced down the glass in front of her face; and with a shriek the cords tore clear out of the ceiling. Bulma crashed to the ground, one arm outstretched above her head, the wrist mired in cables, the other groping uselessly at the tiles to stop her egg-shaped body from rolling over. Landing on her metal arse was bad enough. She did not want to end up face down and stuck.

Laughter rose above the squeal of seizing metal joints: not her mother's titter or her father's rolling chuckle but a patronising cackle she'd only heard once before, and never inside her own house. In the lowest vocabulary she could find, Bulma internally berated Sod's Law for reminding her that things could always be worse.

She forced the suit to sit up and turn toward the doorway. There stood Vegeta in his bodysuit, battered armour conspicuous by its absence. His arms were crossed, shoulders shaking. He stayed his laughter when he realised her eyes were on him, and every crease of his face dedicated itself to the emphasis of his demeaning smirk.

Bulma scowled. 'And what do _you_ think _you're_ looking-' The two-metre-long light bulb her hand had smacked crashed down on her head in a spray of glass. She shrieked, flailing wildly at the air. '-AT!'

'You are beyond ridiculous,' said the saiyan.

He took a step across the threshold as Bulma looked around frantically for some airborne enemy. Slowly the shards of glass twinkling at her from the floor and the crevices of her metal carapace eased their way through her panic, and she forced herself to sit still and take stock. Broken light, cracked ceiling, locked knee, unnecessary heart strain and– what did he just say?

'You want to fight, Vegeta?' she snapped shakily, grasping one leg with both hands and hauling on the locked knee joint until it loosened. One of her shoulders was out of alignment too; she rolled the arm experimentally until it clicked back into place.

Bulma glanced up in time to see him scornfully raise one brow. He'd taken that as a real challenge, she realised, what with her stretching out the robot's limbs. It sent another jolt of panic through her already-hammering heart, but Bulma Briefs was not one to shy away from science. And some sort of spar _would_ be science, it would test the suit, and that was the point. Wasn't it?

Wetting her lips, she pulled back on the controls and the submersible clambered to its feet, shedding glass. She already knew what Yamcha's stance would do to her balance. Knitting her brow, she reached for another. Her lips twitched as memories of several tournaments rose to the forefront of her mind. Vegeta probably wouldn't lower himself to trading blows with her just because she'd suggested it, but maybe if she made him just a little bit angry…

She curved the robot's fingers, raised its arms and angled herself side-on. Admittedly the legs were still too short, the knees too limited, but she thought it was probably a recognisable mock-up of Son Goku's preferred stance. She grinned. 'I'll take you out!'

Vegeta laughed again, though the sound had flattened. She saw his eyes flash as he advanced on her, arms dropping to his sides.

'Will you, indeed,' he said. His smirk had ironed out. She found herself uncomfortably aware of the lines of his heavy muscles beneath the navy blue battlesuit. 'Better do so with one hit, woman. If you don't I won't give you a second shot.' He tilted his head. 'Or do you really presume a piece of scrap like that, manned by a gutless wench like you, could match me in a real fight?'

On Namek, Bulma had dreamt of Vegeta once. He'd found her hiding in a cleft in Namekian rock and advanced on her with his eyes gleaming red. His intent had been obvious then, from his clenched fists to his continuous growl: he was going to kill her.

The dream, she reflected, had it all wrong. Vegeta wasn't threatening because of his brute strength, though he definitely had enough of that. He unnerved her because she couldn't tell what he was planning. All she knew was that he was malicious and utterly confident that no-one could stop him. She tossed her head.

'You? Oh please! I have bigger fish to fry than you!'

He stopped a few strides away from her. 'I highly doubt that, human.'

'Really?' She looked down her nose at him. 'The androids ring any bells?'

Surprise swept malice, wicked amusement and smug confidence from his face for a split second. His eyebrows raised and his breath caught with an audible 'huh'. Then his head tipped back and he guffawed outright.

'You?' he spluttered skyward. 'Fight the androids? In that!'

Indignation fired her veins. 'What do _you_ know?'

Years spent as the weak one amongst her fighter friends had stripped away any of Bulma's existing inhibitions toward violence. Not one of her genius brain cells called in to remind her that she was presently decked out in reinforced steel as she drew back her arm. One second she was set on one of her usual ineffectual swipes, the next, the robot's colossal fist crashed into the side of Vegeta's head with every ounce of force its metal tendons could provide. With one twitch of the joystick, she had decapitated her guest.

Bulma stared, innards compacting as a surge of victory met a wave of shock head on. There was Vegeta, his laughter silenced, his head replaced by her suit's clenched fist.

'Uh,' she said.

The details trickled in. The submersible had been made to withstand intense pressure: plates of metal five centimetres thick encased the arms. That armour now resembled crumpled paper, all gulfs and peaks up to the elbow. It dawned on her that it wasn't her fist at the top of Vegeta's neck but the screwed-up stump of her wrist, as though the metal gauntlet had folded in on itself, engulfed by the forearm.

Slowly, Vegeta raised one hand and dug his fingers into the wrecked steel. With a groan of tortured metal, he pushed her arm away, revealing unblemished tan skin and his angular saiyan nose and cheekbones, unbroken. She hadn't taken off his head. The suit had buckled around him as though she'd struck solid diamond.

'Hey,' she said vaguely, 'your thick skull has a purpose.'

'Remarkably underhanded for a human,' Vegeta said, talking over her. 'That's very good. Shame your pitiful technology lacked the strength to back you up. You've wasted your free hit.'

He held onto the suit's arm. As he stepped closer, so close they were essentially nose to nose, save for the thick glass across the porthole, her mechanical shoulder gave an ominous creak. Though she was still reeling from her brush with murder, the sound of her suit giving way wrenched Bulma back to reality.

'Hey, stop that!' She glowered at his sneering face through the glass. 'I don't want you messing this thing up, it's prototype material!'

He arched a brow and pulled harder on the arm, until a resounding crack marked the early demise of the central shaft.

'Vegeta!' she shrieked. 'Knock that off! I'm not kidding!'

'Your machine is clumsy, poorly wrought, and suffers an incompetent pilot,' he said. 'Be grateful I'm willing to do you a favour and grind it down to scrap before you waste more time on it.'

She released one of the control grips and pounded on the glass.

'It is _not_ scrap-worthy and maybe you haven't noticed, but _I'm still in it!_ Get off!'

'Woman,' he said, that smirk turning sinister, 'very little escapes my notice.'

She smacked the door release.

Upsettingly, it didn't catch him in the face. He was too fast for that. As soon as the lock gave its first warning click he leapt backward, well before the window even started to budge. The door snapped up and out with a gasp of escaping air and, tugging free of her belt, Bulma jumped out of the cockpit and landed a step away from him. She felt infinitely better facing him on her own feet, fists on hips and blue eyes flaring. In the damaged prototype she'd been trapped. Still a little shaky, she poked him in the chest.

'Just. Watch it,' she said, when wit failed her.

She didn't bother to wait for his response. If it was anything other than dour dismissal she was probably dead no matter which way she was facing, so she showed him her back, tossed her curls, and stomped over to one of the stacked work benches, where she knelt. Her father's 'important documents' sat in a pile on the floor; she reached past them and snagged a plastic step stool.

Turning to carry it back to the suit, she saw Vegeta had stepped to the side to keep her in sight. She stuck her tongue out at him and he sneered.

'If you're actually interested,' she said, setting the stool carefully on top of the glass, 'you could just ask.'

'I am _not_ interested in the ways you humans waste your days,' he said sharply. She noted the way his black eyes tracked her hand as she reached into her pocket, then lost interest when she withdrew a black felt-tip pen.

'But you did stop to watch my trial run,' she said, clasping the pen cap in her teeth and leaning up to bisect the suit's injured shoulder joint with a long black line.

'Trial run,' Vegeta echoed scornfully. He crossed his arms and half-turned away from her. 'It rivalled your idiot mother's attempts at picking things off the ground – did no-one ever tell her it's possible to bend at the knee?'

Bulma blinked, blushing slightly across the nose, and glanced sidelong at him, but the prince's expression was merely one of scornful disbelief. Apparently his tactical knowledge stuck to an entirely different path than her mother's. Her pen slowed in the act of labelling the broken shoulder as she allowed the scene to reconstruct in her mind's eye: her mother reaching down for a pen she'd deliberately dropped, skirted rear end presented artfully to the prince. Alright, Mrs Briefs was her mother so her behaviour was genetically humiliating, but it was worth it for the alarm she imagined on Vegeta's face. She grinned.

'You just glimpsed me in passing on the way to my dad's lab, right?' she said.

'My destination is none of your concern,' said Vegeta, but she spoke right over him.

'Well, I actually have something you can take to him.'

She popped the cap back on the pen and stowed it temporarily in her bra. The saiyan scowled as she hopped down from the stool and headed toward her drawing boards.

'I am _not_ some sort of _messenger_ for human convenience.'

'Oh, it's actually for you, but you'll need Dad to build it first.' She glanced back at him as she thumbed through two blueprints for her suit, and caught the look of distrust on his face. 'I'm human,' she said with a shrug, 'we do stuff for other people. I would've thought you were used to that.'

'What gave you that misguided impression?' He stood stock-still beside the submersible, glass at his feet, but Bulma had a satisfying suspicion he was curious. She imagined she could see it in the slight craning of his neck, the narrowing of his eyes.

'Well,' she said, drawing out the intended sheet, 'you're staying here rent-free, eating all this free food, aren'tcha?'

Vegeta's left eye twitched. 'Just show me the damned thing,' he said.

'Because answering that question would be tricksy,' she said, grinning, and carried the blueprint over to him. The static in the air was fairly telling, but as she'd survived the earlier brush with Vegeta's temper she saw no reason to defer to him now. 'Take a look at this technological feat!'

She held up the blueprint with a flourish and waited for a response, watching Vegeta's dark eyes rove over the paper. She'd spent long enough drawing it up to know precisely what he was seeing: a spherical device designed to hover in high gravity, with a laser array and some rudimentary shielding.

'It's a training bot,' she said when the prince remained silent. 'Before you tried to take my head off the other day I saw enough to figure you could probably do with something more difficult to dodge.' She inclined her head, blowing a curl out of her eyes. 'This one's just going to shoot lights at you because I mocked it up in a couple hours, but I've a bunch of other ideas I figure Dad could implement in future.'

He made her the new target of his scrutiny. It was one of the few times she had seen the malice gone from his eyes, but wary intelligence was still there in force.

'Hours,' he said.

'Well, yeah, I have things of my own to do,' she said, rolling up the blueprint and offering it to him. 'The occasional selfless act of genius is just part of my personality, but I can't waste _all_ day on that sort of thing, you know?'

He closed his hand around the scroll, impassive. 'Hn.'

'A thank you would be nice.'

Vegeta turned on his heel and stalked toward the door. 'Don't kid yourself,' he shot over his shoulder, and was gone.

She let out a half-hearted huff of irritation. It wasn't like any of her friends praised her without intensive needling. In fact, if she remembered rightly, Goku had done nothing but bitch and moan about the technology she altruistically introduced him to when they first met. Maybe it was a Saiyan thing. Or, more likely, a _man _thing.

She rolled her eyes and mounted the step stool, snagging the pen from her bra. Mangled metal gleamed in the light from the remaining six bulbs. At least her machinery appreciated her. With all the new data she had gathered in her altercation with Vegeta, she suspected her first suit would go so far as to reward her as well. She pressed felt-tip to steel and got down to work.

* * *

This chapter and I, we are not mates. I don't know why, but describing the suit proved _impossibly difficult_ to the point at which I was in a massive mood writing the rest of it. And rewriting. And rewriting. And rewriting. And going back to the original in a _cloud of hate_. So yeah. This chapter was forced, but at least now I can get on to the next! Readers, I am excite. Perhaps mostly because I never have to write this chapter again. 8D


	6. Innovation Trumps Date Night

**ALL GOOD THINGS  
**by Obsidian Blade**  
**

5.

It took four days of work to strip the submersible down to its core components. Undoing bolts and sliding sheaths of armour plating off limbs was easy enough, but the damaged arm that had crumpled so readily before Vegeta's strength fought Bulma's conventional cutting tools to the bitter end. She had to order in a new laser just to slice off the ruined stub.

Now it stood in disgrace at the centre of her laboratory, slabs of its heavy armour stacked on the floor beside it. Wires ran like veins along limbs that looked stick thin, save for bulging joints at the elbows and knees, to the central computer in the pilot's pod. The pod itself had been cut down to half its original size, the door replaced entirely with a transparent dome. For the damage it had dealt to the overhead lights, Bulma had crowned it with a paper cone. A giant letter D was scrawled on the front in black felt tip.

Sitting on the floor with her back against the suit's thinned calves, Bulma balanced her laptop on her outstretched legs. Intently, she scanned lists of parts from the Capsule Corporation's suppliers and added them to her shopping cart with businesslike clicks. She ignored the expenses column racking up thousands in the right hand corner, irrelevant to a family like hers, and reached out to lift her mug, which sat in an open tray of her toolbox. She wrinkled her nose as the tea hit her lips stone-cold. She hadn't been at this that long, she was sure, though she guessed a few hours might explain the amount of scrolling she had to do to reach the top of her shopping list. Grumbling, she confirmed the order and set the laptop aside, intent on brewing some replacement caffeine.

'Oh, are you off for some lunch?'

She looked up to find her father idling in the doorway as though he'd only stopped in passing. He grasped a white sphere the size of a football in his hands, not that she'd ever seen her father show even a passing interest in sports. It was far more likely to be a new light fixture, or perhaps a self-watering pot for her mother's plants. She shook her head and looked up into her father's hopeful expression.

'It's only eleven, Dad.'

'Is it?' The doctor gave her his best look of disbelief. Having lived with him all her life, Bulma was not convinced. He shrugged. 'Well, that's the perfect time for lunch, I'm quite sure.'

'Only for early birds like you.' Bulma stood and stretched before holding out her mug as proof. 'I'm just getting tea but I can bring you some lunch in your lab on my way back, if you want.'

'That would be delightful, dear,' said Dr Briefs. 'That Vegeta doesn't half ask for a lot. But I suppose I have _you_ to blame for this one, too.'

He stepped toward her and held up the object in his hands. It wasn't a perfect sphere, slightly ovular, and two antennae sprouted from its top and bottom. A horizontal slot ran across its belly, just as she'd indicated in her blueprints.

'One of my training bots!' Bulma darted forward, snatched it from his hands and inspected it from every angle. 'Wow, Dad, you really made it!'

'I certainly did. Well, this much of it, anyway.' He scratched his head. 'That energy reflecting dish you suggested was proving a tad long-winded to implement, and client patience isn't exactly on my side.'

Bulma snorted. 'I bet.'

It wasn't difficult to imagine how the exchange between Vegeta and her father might go. Vegeta's stubbornness was problematic enough, but she doubted Dr Briefs would remember what he was arguing about long enough to see it through. Her gaze drifted from the bot in her hands.

'Hey, hold this a sec.'

Handing the machine back, she jogged over to one of the stacks of workbenches. Admittedly she wasn't the tidiest of scientists, but as Bulma rooted through dirty plates, food wrappers, rampant coils of wire and the sodden remains of this week's gossip magazine-turned-tea-sponge she really didn't care. Her fingers brushed something smooth and pulled it free of the debris. It was a yellow disc, flat on one side and convex on the other. Oh yes. Why worry about cleanliness when you could pull a genius design like this from beneath last night's takeaway? Casually she carried it over to her father, grinning smugly.

'You can just tack on the test model I made last week.'

She handed it over and watched as he inspected it, the training droid laid temporarily on the ground at his feet.

'You have been busy,' he said vaguely, peering at the metal over the rims of his glasses.

'Yup,' said Bulma. 'It works alright with the sort of power I can generate in the lab. Who knows how it'll fare against Vegeta – but it's got to be better than nothing, right?'

He nodded absently in agreement. 'Where Vegeta meets machine, only Vegeta comes out unscathed,' he said, without hint of bitterness. 'Maybe this will give our team a fighting chance, eh?'

'Hey, I'd like to think we'll actually get one over on him,' Bulma said. 'Aim high, Dad.'

'Mmm.'

She rolled her eyes and waited. He was clearly embedded somewhere deep in his brain, and there was no point trying to forcibly excavate him. Idly she reached down and lifted the droid off the ground and up to head-height. The horizontal gulf across its middle stared back at her lifelessly. What would it be like to actually beat Vegeta at his own game, she wondered. To an extent, that was the aim of her battle suit, but she held no delusions about that: it wouldn't be good enough for months yet, maybe years. This little droid, though? If her reflective disc held out, hell. It had a chance.

She grinned at the thought of the proud Saiyan prince staggering from Capsule3 and into her kitchen as she poured herself some coffee. He'd look up at her, open awe on his face – _Bulma, you are a true genius_ – and she'd give him the differential smile of one far superior – _oh, it's so kind of you to say, Vegeta dear_ – and take a victory swig from her mug. It would be her finest hour so far and, where her life was concerned, that was saying something.

'Bulma?'

She blinked and peered around the droid. Her father blinked back.

'Sorry,' she said, 'just thinking.' _Perfectly reasonable thoughts._

'Of course. Well, I have an idea. How about you fix this-' he waved the disc '-on that-' he gestured to the bot '-while I get my own lunch. Then I'll take it through to Vegeta to see what he thinks, and you can get back to whatever it is you're up to.' He gave the wire-entangled figure behind her a precursory glance. 'Upgrading the submersible, are you?'

'Oh, something like that.'

He nodded vacantly and handed over the disc. 'Well, alright. How're the documents going?'

Bulma rolled her eyes. 'Fine, I've got through at least half of them,' she lied. 'I'll pass them on when they're done, okay?'

'Fair enough, fair enough,' said her father, making for the door. 'Have fun with those. I'll be enjoying some cheese and pickle.'

As soon as he turned the corner Bulma scowled vehemently, mouthing 'how're the documents going?' and stomping over to the least-cluttered workbench. Shoving the mess aside, she threw down bot and disc – before guilt took over and she gently inspected both to be sure she hadn't dented them. She would brand them utter failures if she had, of course, but that wasn't the point. These were her designs realised in solid metal, cool against her hands. Her rage trickled away as she took note of the quality of her father's work: the precise welds, the expensive materials. It almost felt like heresy, boring holes into the front to fix her deflector in place, but Bulma was no idiot. Back on Namek low-level soldiers had sheared right through their ship with ki cannons. Without the deflector in place to bounce Vegeta's raw power away, she doubted even her father's fine craftsmanship could hold out against the saiyan's strength.

Her suit was going to have the same issue, she thought darkly as she drilled matching holes in the dish and lined them up against the bot. The idea of an energy blast punching through the cockpit and right through _her_ bothered Bulma a heck of a lot more than losing a droid, too. She suppressed a shudder. Those androids wouldn't hold back for her sake, they were going to be shooting to kill. But Vegeta was a ki-toting behemoth. If she could get his training devices tough enough to endure his attacks, she could probably transfer that technology to the suit's armour and, pow, problem solved. She wouldn't even have to say please or thank you for his oh-so-useful input, either.

Grinning, she dusted metal shavings from the droid and picked it up. The disc sat neatly against its curved side, ready to act as her spy within Vegeta's domain. It was, no doubt about it, _beautiful_ and, now that she thought about it, she could always spare a little time to make it a twin in one of the newer compounds she'd been eyeing up for the suit's hull…

Hours later, the first droid had been delivered and no complaints had made their way back to Bulma from Capsule3. That was, however, the least of her problems for the time being. In her tattiest overalls, she stood in the doorway to her lab with a circuit board in one hand and a soldering iron in the other. Its black flex stretched to one of the workbenches, which she had set aside from its stack. The new droid lay with its upgraded guts hanging from the open front of its casing.

Her mind fumbled over dates. Her trip to the salon with her mother had been on the twentieth. That must have been the Thursday: she had watched her favourite soap in the evening and gouged herself with her ridiculous new nails when her favourite character had come to blows with her long-lost father. So, if the salon day had been Thursday the twentieth, her cuts had scabbed over and she'd had five morning coffees since then, that made today Tuesday the twenty-fifth. Or, as she'd been trying to lay off the coffee, that made today Tuesday the twenty-sixth: the one that actually existed on the calendar, and that Yamcha had reserved for a film night. Considering the tall, muscular fighter standing in the hallway just outside her lab, she suspected it was the latter.

'I don't know what to tell you, Yamcha,' she said, rubbing one eye with the heel of her hand. 'I thought today was yesterday.'

She knew Yamcha was one to grin and cringe and bear it, but the dry white light pouring out of her lab threw some fairly misleading black shadows across his face. His tan features, usually so soft, had a definite harshness to them thanks to that light.

'Bulma,' he said, 'I reminded you on the intercom half an hour ago.'

His tone jumped awkwardly, as though he was biting something back. Bulma arched a brow – was that reproach? Because she actually had something important to do?

'Well, I wasn't listening.' Self-righteousness crept up her throat and set the angry turn of her lips, and why not? 'You should have had me write it in my diary and read it back to you, or something.'

'Don't you think you should have just remembered?' That _actually_ sounded like a hint of backbone, but it only lasted for a second before Yamcha's brows drew up, placating. 'Come on,' he said, trying to smile, 'we do this most weeks.'

Bulma rolled her eyes. '"We do this most weeks" isn't exactly a great thing to be able to say about a date, Yamcha.'

'Damn it Bulma!'

The flat of Yamcha's fist and forearm braced him against the doorframe, eyes shut and trembling, his muscles taut right across his body. Bulma's heart fluttered in her chest. She'd never seen him quite like this. She'd seen him back down plenty of times before but she'd never seen him unsure, never seen him conflicted. She took a step toward him, but before she could reach out and touch him he raised his head and stared right at her.

'I shouldn't have to put a _note_ in my girlfriend's diary to get her to just watch a movie with me on her own television.'

She hadn't thought of Yamcha as intense for years, but the painful energy in his eyes was undeniable. He was standing his ground against her for the first time she could recall, but this wasn't the battle of wills she'd been looking for. For a split second – an insane second – she wanted to call this a death throe, but that compulsion was thankfully gone as quickly as it had come. Nevertheless, she had no idea how to riposte against someone this raw. The circuit board lowered from her chest to her side.

'I just have something really important to do,' she said.

'Uh-huh,' he said, resting his head back against his fist and closing his eyes. 'Of course you do.'

'I can,' she started, and paused. 'I can… you know, leave it for now. Come watch the film. I can do that fine.'

Yamcha shook his head. 'No.' He stood up straight. 'No, don't worry about it.' A wincing grin creased his face. 'After this outburst? Bulma, I'd feel humiliated the whole time.' He waved a hand dismissively, the grin weakening into a sad smile as he turned away. 'Good luck with your project. I'll see you in the morning.'

He left her standing in the doorway of her lab, her excitement about the training droids coagulating in the pit of her stomach as something thick and heavy and nauseating. Slowly she trailed back to the table and set down the circuit board and the soldering iron. For no apparent reason she was sweating, and her face felt hot. Goddamnit, though, she hadn't wanted to see a film. She wanted to stay holed up in her lab and work on things she was good at, things she enjoyed, things that _mattered_.

Not that Yamcha didn't matter. She lifted a wrench and tapped it against her knuckles. Of course Yamcha mattered. She loved Yamcha. But these girlfriend duties, things like idling next to him on the sofa watching a film… did she really have to bother with all of those? Where they really that necessary?

She set down the wrench and cast her gaze over the circuit board, over the chips and transistors. Her lip curled in a disappointed sneer. Oh, she shouldn't be surprised at her occasional act of stupidity, she guessed they came to pass because otherwise someone as gifted as her just wouldn't be allowed to exist. Each one still pissed her off. _Obviously_ she needed to do girlfriend things. She was a girlfriend. Girlfriends did girlfriend things or they were _just friends_. If she wanted romance she was just going to have to suck it up and go on dates instead of tooling around in here being productive.

She closed her eyes and drew in a long breath through her nose. Tonight she would formulate her game plan and tomorrow, tomorrow she would put it into effect because she knew, despite the fights and the whining and his bloody lack of backbone, that she and Yamcha were simply meant to be. And you didn't give up on something like that.

* * *

It is so hot here. So ridiculously hot. And my computer is a heat-spewing monster of a gaming machine with no mercy and so many fans blowing out hot air into my room and an open window is not enough! It is not enough! So here is a filler chapter while I find some ice.

...Before I do that, though, I do have a question. I'm trying to be all professional and shizzle by keeping my chapters fairly uniform in length, but honestly I feel I'm doing it in a totally amateur way by just _stopping writing_ when I reach a little over 2.5k words. I think this chapter in particular has suffered as a result, it doesn't have as much content in it as I would like. So! Should I ditch my length limits? It might mean I rattle on for thousands of words at a time, or have chapters sitting at just over a thousand words. Well, maybe not the latter so much. I do like the sound of my own (narrative) voice. Still! Yeah! Stuff! It's hot! I'm going to stop prattling because it being hot does not make me sound at all intelligent! :D But thankee as always for readin', and double thankee to anyone who drops me a review.


	7. The 10,000 Word Chapter

So, yes. Thank you for all your useful advice re: word limits. I agreed with you all. Then I read snowbunny07's kind review; regarded the number 10,000; recalled the _challenge accepted_ rule my house ran with at university; realised _how much I miss university_; and promptly set myself another word limit.

I'm, er, sorry. But only a little bit.

Would also like to clarify that this is a one-off. Forever.

**ALL GOOD THINGS**  
By Obsidian Blade

Her mother's subscriptions to twelve different gossip magazines had always kept Bulma well-informed, on fashion, on makeup, on sex and on relationships. Being a woman of many talents, she'd never felt _reliant_ on the various equalising tactics laid out in the glossy pages, but she held no delusions: she'd retained an awful lot of stuff, and it came in handy at times like these. She bolstered her plans for the day with ample convention.

At seven in the morning – an ungodly hour – she tramped back and forth across her bedroom floor, gathering clothes and dumping them into a pile at the bottom of her wardrobe. Old crisp packets, mostly-empty drinks cans and chocolate bar wrappers went into a black plastic bin bag, while company documents stacked up under her bed. Glancing around, she was rewarded by the sight of her _actual carpet._ It only took twelve squirts of her perfume to cover the faint smell of old food, too.

Yamcha was a soppy romantic. Alright, studying with Muten Roshi had given him a bad case of the wandering eyes, but she had seen too many reparation scenes from him to think that was the measure of the man. He liked to bring her roses; he liked to sit curled up with her on the sofa, whiling away the hours; he liked eating dinner together, just the two of them; and he was fond of stargazing together on the roof when her parents were away. Their picnic just a few weeks before had been his idea, too.

The end result, of course, was that Bulma had never really had to arrange any of this herself. She'd definitely never tried to change that: if Yamcha put in the effort, she had plenty of time to look gorgeous and work on her machines, and when some of the mushier dates bored her she could lump all the blame on him.

She paused in the midst of thrusting a few of her mother's roses into a vase on her dressing table. Obviously she didn't _really_ scold Yamcha for every date-gone-wrong. To be honest, she wasn't entirely sure why her mind had made up that particular lie. Pawing awkwardly at her hair, she frowned at her reflection in the mirror and resolved not to play any blame games. That sort of thinking wouldn't get her anywhere, and right now they were in dire need of some forward movement to get out of their slump.

Not too much forward movement, mind. Puar had let slip years ago that Yamcha's goal in life was marriage, and that sort of leap had _no_ place in today's schedule. She wanted to patch their relationship back up, not weld the two of them together at the hip.

Scowling, she fished out matching underwear and one of her simpler dresses from the clean-clothes pile atop the wardrobe and stripped off her pyjamas. In the mirror she fussed over the finer details: her cleavage, her flyaways, her makeup. She doubted she had ever put so much effort into getting ready for breakfast. In fact, she regularly treated all the members of her household to the sight of her threadbare old nightie and her panda eyes from the previous day's mascara. But not today. Today her room smelled of lavender rather than pizza and metal, because Yamcha was waiting downstairs. She was going to impress, with a clean bedroom and _actual clothes_.

She paused to hide the bag of rubbish under her bed before vacating the room and heading toward the kitchen. The windows were open to let in the warm morning air, and she could hear her mother humming to herself down in the garden, a high-pitched partner to the decidedly more destructive drone of Capsule3. Across the grass she could see the light on in her father's laboratory window, too. Absently she ran her fingers through her curls. She and Yamcha would have no interruptions until lunchtime at least. Yawning, she ground her knuckles against her eyes.

And balked. Scrubbing her eyes was all well and good on the usual shabby stroll down to breakfast, but it sure as hell was not today. She forced her hands to her sides, but too late: the knuckles were already streaked with black. Her mother had put various mirrors on the walls all around the house as soon as Bulma had reached fifteen – 'Now you can see how pretty you are all day long!' – and she stopped to peer into one on the wall just outside the kitchen, its frame crowded with glitter and kittens. Not even the rose-tinted glass could hide her smudged eyeliner, and her hair looked more tumbleweed than cotton ball. She squirmed just short of the kitchen doorway, agonising. Would it be worth heading all the way back to her room just to fix herself up?

'What's the matter, Yamcha?' Puar's distinctive voice came from just around the corner. 'Aren't you going to eat that?'

Bulma fought the urge to stomp her foot, envisaging her boyfriend's pointer-dog stare from the kitchen table. _Of course_ Yamcha could sense her loitering out here like a floozy. If she cleared off to redo her face, he'd sense her turning on her heel and walking away from him.

She stepped forward. She really had no choice, and besides, he'd known her for years. She didn't need to look _immaculate _for him to appreciate she'd tried to spruce up her morning lethargy for him.

The kitchen welcomed her with the smell of bacon, eggs, and something sweeter. Dressed in his orange training gi, his cropped hair falling loosely around his face, Yamcha sat at the table with a near-empty plate in front of him. Puar rested just by his arm, but took to the air as soon as Bulma entered the room, his long tail twitching anxiously.

'Good morning,' she said as brightly as she could, giving them both a smile and making for the fridge. Alright, so the initial plan had been to saunter over and give him her complete attention from the start, but she was an awful lot thirstier than she'd thought. He wouldn't mind sharing her affections with a carton of orange juice.

'Oh!' said Puar. 'Good morning, Bulma. I was just going to, uh, help your mother with the garden! I'm the best secateurs she has!' He gave a panicked giggle. 'Have a lovely breakfast!'

Within seconds he was a retreating streak of blue. That boded well. Bulma drew a steadying breath and turned from the fridge, juice carton in hand, to find Yamcha looking up at her. They held one another's gaze for a moment, before his eyes dipped to travel over her clothes and makeup. His lips turned up just a little at the sight.

'You look nice,' he said.

'Hey.' She stuck out her hip. 'Try gorgeous.'

He laughed lightly. 'Yeah.'

Wetting her lips, Bulma shook the carton. 'Want some?' She glanced over to the kitchen worktop and spied a plate bound up in plastic wrap. 'And oh, hey, I see Mom left some pancakes out.' She leant forward to give an exploratory sniff. 'Sweet ones. Shall we? I know where they'll end up otherwise.' She wrinkled her nose in distaste.

Yamcha spread his hands neutrally. 'Sure.'

He had a leftover piece of bacon on his plate, but pushed the whole thing aside as Bulma went about separating pancakes and putting them in the microwave to heat. Through the corner of her eye, she watched him follow the grain of the tabletop with a fingertip. There was a pensive look on his face she felt fell more on the side of troubled than she would have liked.

'Listen, about last night-' he started after a moment.

'My fault,' she interrupted. She slid warm pancakes onto two plates and carried them to the table, where she set them down decisively. 'I got carried away a bit with all my work. I didn't mean it. So, sorry. Don't worry about it.'

He cut into a pancake with the side of his fork as Bulma spread strawberry jam on hers.

'Aren't I supposed to say the last bit?'

'I didn't mean it like I was forgiving myself, Yamcha. I meant it like… it was a one-off, you don't need to worry about it happening again.' She rolled and folded her pancake until it was small enough to spear with her fork and lift as one bloated piece. 'I was reassuring you.'

'Okay,' said Yamcha.

They fell into silence as they ate. It would have been a comfortable silence, no doubt, if her father's cat-tailed clock wasn't so damn loud. It was mounted on the wall in the hall outside, but she could hear each tick as though it were pressed against her ear. Unbidden, her mind began to count the click of each second. One without any conversation, two without any conversation, three without any conversation, four…

Well, this was ridiculous. Here she was with the man she knew best in all the world, and these damn pancakes had completely stopped her from being able to talk freely with him. Scowling at her plate as she chewed, she resolved to purposefully remember every topic that came to mind while they were rendered mute by breakfast food. The androids. Their friends. The weather. Number one was too depressing. They hadn't seen any of their friends since the trip to Kame House, so there was no gossip to support number two.

'Hey,' she said between mouthfuls, 'sure is sunny at the moment. You know my mom's left all the windows open upstairs? Definitely couldn't do that if it was raining.'

Yamcha shot her a baffled smile. 'Uh, yeah. I guess.'

A long pause. Four hundred seconds without any conversation. That was nearly seven minutes. The pancakes were long gone.

'Hey, you know what? The weather was good for that, uh, picnic, too,' said Yamcha, clearly groping for a topic. Her gaze lurched to his and his smile strained. 'That was a good picnic.'

'Yeah,' Bulma said quickly, 'I always like picnics.'

'Yeah. And picnics there were always the best.'

'Yeah. I'll miss that place, you know.'

'Yeah.'

He glanced sideways through the window, frowning faintly, and Bulma picked at a stubborn crescent of grease under her thumbnail. The clock ticked on.

'So, the new season's starting soon,' Yamcha ventured.

Oh, as though she was going to indulge _that_ particular topic. Her face twisted in disdain. What the hell was this? She had plenty to talk about. She had loads going on in her lab, but even that was unnecessary fodder. She could tell him about the day she had planned: the two of them cloistered away in her room for a day of sex and chat and just general _togetherness_, with dinner on the rooftop with candles and petals and stars and all the good things he enjoyed.

For some reason this bolstering knowledge merely reinforced the barricade across her throat. This _never_ happened. Bulma Briefs was a free spirit, a great conversationalist, the life and soul of everything, and here she was struggling to broach a topic like some sort of repressed wreck-

She looked up from her internal tirade just in time to lock eyes with Vegeta as he stopped to let himself in through the conservatory door. The click of the latch alerted Yamcha to the saiyan's presence, and the couple watched him wordlessly from the table as he stepped inside.

He was a mess, as per usual. Ridges of clotted blood followed long, parallel scratches down his left side. Both knees were mottled green and yellow. A cast of soot covered his right arm from fist to bicep, boding ill for some unfortunate piece of machinery. Underlined with dark shadows, his eyes roved from Bulma to Yamcha, expression twisting to deeper levels of disgust, before he stalked past them both and on into the house, wordless.

The two humans blinked.

'Wow,' said Yamcha, after Vegeta's footsteps had faded away down the hall. 'D'you think maybe peace and quiet might be catching?'

Bulma smirked. 'I know, right? Where were the demands? Where was the insane ego?'

Rising to the topic, Yamcha puffed out his chest and crossed his arms, glaring across the table at her. 'Serving woman,' he said haughtily, 'fetch me a sandwich at once.'

'I am the prince of all Saiyans,' she snapped back, nose in the air, 'I will not sully myself with kitchen banter!'

'Manners are way below me.'

'And that's a real change, because most things are so high _above_ me I can't reach them without a step-stool.'

They both burst into laughter at that. When the last guffaws trailed off Bulma finally felt relaxed. She reached out and stacked up their plates.

'Seriously though,' she said, 'maybe he's injured or something.'

Yamcha glanced in the direction Vegeta had departed. His brow creased slightly, a sure sign that he was scouting out the other warrior's energy.

'Nah,' he said after a moment, 'he's fine. You don't have anything to worry about anyway, the guy's just as durable as Goku.'

She pushed back her chair and carried the plates to the sink, rinsing away butter, grease and leftover strawberry jam. 'I still don't want him bleeding all over my house. And you're underestimating Dad's gravity generator. I think it could squash both him _and _Goku flat.' She paused. 'Well, maybe before this whole super saiyan thing happened, anyway.'

'Hey, we fighters are tough. I bet I could handle the gravity too.'

Habit kicked in and Bulma gravitated toward the kettle. She glanced at him speculatively. 'Why don't you, then, Yamcha?'

'Sharing that ship with Vegeta?' He winced. 'I'm trying to give him a second chance and all, but that doesn't mean I want to offer any excuses to try and kill me accidentally-on-purpose.'

'There is the older ship,' she said thoughtfully.

'A hand-me-down?' said Yamcha with remarkable fire.

'A stop-gap in case you want Dad to make you another one,' Bulma retorted. 'It can still get up to two hundred. Enough to squash you flat.' She rolled her eyes.

He said nothing for a moment. Then, quietly: 'Sure.'

She dowsed a tea bag with scalding water and glanced back at him again. He looked perfectly neutral now, gazing at his hands, laid palm-down on the table in front of him.

'We just need to be ready,' he said, 'for the androids.'

'Yeah,' she said lamely, stirring sugar into her tea. 'Three years from now.'

He nodded slightly. 'Yeah.'

With nothing else to add, she could hear that damn clock again. Ten seconds of renewed silence, thirty, fifty– damned if she was letting this happen.

'I've been working on a better chipset for the training bots my dad and I put together, actually. I'd almost be wasting them on Vegeta, they're going to be so much smarter than the ones he's using.'

She watched Yamcha under her lashes as she took out the tea bag and reached for the milk. No response.

'Faster reactions; better understanding of reflection so they can bounce those ki-blasts wherever they want; proper teamwork; stronger skin; you name it, it's been upgraded.'

Singing the new bots' praises did nothing. Even with her technological carrot swinging right under his nose, Yamcha managed a faint smile at best. His eyes had glazed over.

'I could make some for you,' she spat out in the place of the choice retorts her temper was brewing up. 'To help you train.'

He blinked his way out of his stupor, the bewilderment in his dark eyes pronounced enough to match Goku's at his most clueless. 'Huh?'

Bulma banished her glare to the bottom of the stainless steel sink. Without stirring it, she chugged her tea: bitter 'til the last two swallows, when it became almost unbearably sweet. She poured the sickly remains down the drain and ran the hot tap to chase the last pale swirls away. Four hundred and twenty ticks since either of them had last spoken, and now her throat was in agony. She saw no point in carrying out her plans. A day together? They could barely entertain one another for a full minute. She massaged her neck and stayed put.

'I better get back to training,' she heard him say eventually, underlined by the scrape of his chair against the floor.

'Great,' she said.

She made herself turn and give him the smallest smile, which he returned with equal uncertainty. Then he was gone through the door Vegeta had left unlocked. He traipsed past her mother's rose beds, past the capsule ship her father had placed on his training patch, and disappeared behind the vast dome that had housed the Namekians.

Suddenly feeling like utter shit, Bulma turned the kettle back on. Nevermind her scalded throat, she was definitely in need of more tea.

o o o

Bulma worked non-stop throughout the day and on through the night. She didn't enjoy it. By morning her brain pounded from near-constant caffeine soaks: first tea, then coffee. Her shoulders ached, bunched into a mass of knots as she bored holes in metal plates with mechanical accuracy. The armour was thick. Even with all her tools, cutting through it was hard work, but for once the burn in her muscles barely registered. It felt like worthy penance for an unspecified crime.

_I've done nothing wrong,_ she thought savagely for the twentieth time. So the day hadn't gone as planned. So what? Neither of them was going anywhere. They would have other chances. Their conversational drought meant nothing, even if it _was_ becoming a common occurrence. They were just tired, distracted. Given time they'd be right back on track, chattering away, and when she talked about her work in the lab he would damn well listen to her-

The electric drill jumped from the hole she was boring, screeched across the metal plate and cut straight through her glove, gouging the side of her thumb. She didn't have enough spit to swear after a half-hour spent mumbling: mute, Bulma hauled the plug clear out of the socket and hurled the power tool across the room. It smashed her favourite mug, glanced off the wall and clattered down the back of a workbench.

She stood, shoulders heaving painfully, and stared venomously at the mess until the wet patch in her ruined glove grew to engulf the whole thumb.

'Well _fuck_ you,' she snarled at everything in general.

'Oh deary,' said her mother's flowery voice from the doorway. 'What's the matter with my sweet darling Bulma?'

'Nothing,' Bulma said dourly, her rage corralled into a teenagerly sulk by the sudden presence of her parent.

The glove was heavy with blood. Wincing at the mere sight of it, Bulma squeezed her eyes shut as she eased it off her injured hand.

'Oh, it sure doesn't look like nothing.'

Feeling the warmth of her mother right by her side, Bulma opted to let her deal with the wound.

'How bad is it?' she asked wearily.

'Well…'

Warm, dainty fingers closed around Bulma's wrist and knuckles. Mrs Briefs' palms brushed soothingly over her hand as she turned it gently to inspect the damage, tutting to herself.

'Baby, it's bleeding an awful lot. How about you sit down and let me patch you up.'

Naturally, she didn't wait for an answer. Eyes shut, Bulma sank down onto the nearest stool and listened to her mother totter away in her high heels. Without painstaking work to keep her busy, she could feel her concentration slipping toward sleep as she sat in self-imposed darkness. Her muscles relaxed across her body, tension running from her shoulders. The solid sense of unease in the pit of her stomach showed no sign of retreating, but as she listened to the morning breeze through her blinds and the steady hum of Capsule3 her rage dissolved into straightforward exhaustion. Why on earth had she stayed up all night? She hadn't argued with Yamcha, they hadn't fallen out. It had been a non-event. She was overreacting.

The hollow clip-clop of plastic platform shoes announced Pansy's return. Bulma opened her eyes slowly. Her mother carried an armload of boxes, topped with a bottle of antiseptic wash.

'There we go, dear,' she said, dropping the lot onto a bench alongside an enormous stack of metal plates.

Bulma stared blearily at the suit parts for a moment: each hole in precisely the right place, each plate perfectly cast. She couldn't remember the last time she had done so much work in one sitting.

'Now, I didn't know what you'd want on your plaster, so I brought a selection.' Pansy picked up the nearest box and waved it at Bulma. It was garish pink. 'Pony print?' She snagged another, pale blue and emblazoned with a yellow cement mixer. 'Or maybe you're feeling more like a tomboy today.'

Bulma leant back her head, staring up at the ceiling. She doubted a kids' stick-on plaster was going to patch up a cut that was bleeding as much as hers, but hadn't the strength to argue the point.

'Aren't there any plain ones?'

'But dear, that's not any fun. Are you sure?'

'Yes.'

'Well, alright then. If you just give me your poor paw…'

She held out her arm and tried not to wince as her mother swabbed it clean with a series of cotton buds. The blood flow was apparently easy enough to staunch with a little pressure, but she most definitely was not watching to see the miracle in action. Instead her eyes roamed her work and the walls, which seemed unusually distant today, as though she was looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

'Wow, I don't think I've been this tired in a while,' she said absently.

'Then what you should do is sleep, Bulma,' said Mrs Briefs, pulling the protective plastic from the back of a plaster. 'Though you should definitely have some waffles first. I bought extra mix now I know they're that sweet boy's favourites.'

Bulma rubbed at her eyes with her good hand. 'Which "sweet boy", mother?'

'Why, Vegeta, of course.' She tittered.

Bulma frowned slightly at the thought of Vegeta in the kitchen, working his way through plates of waffles. The gluttony wasn't hard to picture, but she couldn't quite work out how he would ever show appreciation of anything, let alone pick something in particular as his favourite. Muzzily she attempted to magic a smile onto imaginary-Vegeta's face. Raising the corners of his mouth was easy enough – she'd seen him mid-evil grin, after all – but those dark brows proved near impossible to soften. She shook her head.

'Bulma!'

Puar's high-pitched voice punctured her thoughts. The cat-like creature flew straight over to her from the open door. His eyes were wide, pointed ears low against his head with panic, and his long tail lashed in anxious circles. He ducked in the air to Pansy.

'I'm sorry, I don't want to interrupt.' He looked to Bulma before her mother had a chance to respond. 'You haven't seen Yamcha, have you?'

'Uh,' said Bulma, 'since when?'

'Last night!' Puar's front paws waved frantically. 'He was there when I went to sleep, but now he's gone!'

'Your Yamcha's a grown boy, Puar,' said Mrs Briefs, applying plasters to the cut and giving Bulma's arm a pat. 'So don't you worry, he's probably off busy.'

'Yeah, I bet he's just training,' Bulma said, offering Puar a smile she probably couldn't have conjured up for the man in question.

'But that's what I'm afraid of,' said Puar, his voice hitching. 'Yesterday when he was training he stopped to watch what Vegeta was doing and he came over all steely. He, uh.' The cat's eyes shot to Mrs Briefs before the urge to find Yamcha overcame any appreciation of the couple's privacy. 'He said you were boasting about bots that were too strong for him, that only Vegeta could use! And he'd just seen how extreme Vegeta's training is, but he was still set on matching it himself. I think he might be using those bots, Bulma!'

'What?' Bulma risked an inspection of her mother's handiwork. To her relief, the blood was gone, though she wasn't sure what to make of the crisscrossed mass of tan-coloured plasters that held her skin shut. 'That's not a problem, Puar. If he'd been _listening_ he'd know I meant the bots were _wasted_ on Vegeta and I'd much rather make them for him!'

Puar squeaked, cowering in the air.

'Misunderstandings happen, dear-' her mother started, but Bulma cut her off.

'I know!' She scowled. 'Puar, come with me. If Yamcha wanted bots he'd have to go to my dad about it.'

She jumped off the stool, suddenly completely awake, and stomped for the door, Puar in pursuit.

'I'll ask the house bots if they've seen him, dear!' her mother called after them.

There was a wireless house phone in the hall. Bulma grabbed it as they passed, punching in Yamcha's number. His home phone rang out. His car phone was off. She glared at the handset. Bots that were _too good_ for him…

'That idiot, that wasn't what I meant,' she said aloud, tossing the phone down on the countertop as they passed through the kitchen and out through the conservatory door. Capsule3 sat dark and quiet on the grass.

'It's what he heard,' said Puar.

Bulma looked up at him, levitating along overhead.

'Did he say anything _else_ about yesterday?'

Puar shook his head resolutely. For a moment he glared ahead, but then his ears lowered and his frown crumpled. 'I thought you two were going to _fix_ everything yesterday,' he said.

'We made up about that disaster of a film night.'

'But that's so little.'

The lump in her stomach sent out an unfamiliar chill through her guts at that. Puar was Yamcha's most trusted confidant. She had no idea what her boyfriend might have said, but to elicit a fearful look like that from Puar it must have been bad.

She rolled her eyes. Then again, here was Puar: panicking because Yamcha wanted to up his game. The thought of him trying out a few of her droids was a good one. She let her lips twitch in the slightest of smiles and strode up to her father's building.

K-I-T-T-Y. The door slid open and she and Puar moved inside. Her eyes darted sideways to take in the capsule ships with their new titanium skeletons as they made their way through the hangar. If Yamcha liked the bots, she could probably coerce her father into offering up one of those ships. She might even use the occasion to get onto the project herself. For a moment, she imagined working together with her boyfriend on Capsule4. He could test the thing and suggest changes to improve his training; she could make the alterations and brainstorm more bots. Now _that_, that would patch any problems in their relationship, without any wasted hours in front of the television or wasted money on unnecessary restaurants. As a team they would be brilliant.

For no discernable reason, she sighed as she reached the end of the corridor. Her father's door was outlined in light as per usual, and she grasped the handle without knocking. A sudden flash of memory stopped her from flinging the door open; casually she slowed her hand and eased her way through the gap, glancing warily around for any spiteful doorblocks. Nothing. Just her father placidly typing away at his desk.

'Bulma,' he said cordially, his eyes on the screen. Puar apparently didn't register in his peripheral vision. 'I'm rather glad to see you're up. I needed to ask you-'

'Mr Briefs, did Yamcha come in here for any of your training droids?' Puar blurted, darting down to his desktop.

He blinked at the cat, bewildered at the sudden appearance. Hesitantly his hand reached out and patted Puar lightly on the head. 'Well, no. No, he hasn't.'

Bulma scowled. 'Well, there's that theory scuppered. Either he's out training "at his own pace" or he's off perving over magazines in the supermarket.'

'But what I wanted to ask you might be relevant to the both of you,' her father said, blithely ignoring his daughter's outburst. 'The gravity simulator in Capsule3 was running for a short while last night, you see, but it wasn't that man Vegeta. He left yesterday evening and hasn't come back yet, as far as I can tell.'

Puar's horrified squeak came simultaneously with Bulma's immediate demand: 'How high? Has anyone been in there since?'

'Straight to three hundred, Bulma, that's why I thought you might want to know. Pressure like that could do serious damage.'

She didn't need her father to spell _that_ out. Three hundred Gs. More than enough to crush a human being to death. Enough to shatter bone, burst veins, rupture organs… and Capsule3 was sitting out there on the grass with its light off and every chance that Yamcha was sprawled on the floor inside.

Bulma broke into a sprint before she was even out of the office. The upgraded capsule ships, stuffed with technology her father wasn't sharing, flashed by unheeded as she raced for the exit and burst into the sunlight.

'Bulma, wait!' Puar wailed from behind her, but Bulma did no such thing. Her body burned as though she had a fever, and somehow the heat spurred her on. What if Yamcha was dying? What if Yamcha was dead?

She rounded the side of Capsule3 just as Vegeta, battered and bruised worse than ever and clad in the black shorts her mother had bought for him, dropped from the sky by the ship. The huge metal door opened like a drawbridge as soon as he tapped in the entrance code.

'Vegeta!' she called as he made for the door.

He merely glanced at her, expression hard but remarkably neutral. He didn't slow. The ramp began to rise behind him.

Bulma didn't hesitate. It didn't matter that she was still a few steps away, or that the door was already halfway off the ground. She threw herself forward, crashing belly-first into the side of the ramp. For a second she scrambled at the metal plating, finding no finger holds in her father's work, before a wild kick met the ground and her weight lurched forward. Her muscles wrenching, she pulled herself up just in time to be thrown to the ground inside the ship as it clanked shut.

It was filthy. Her father had fitted Capsule3 with the same glossy red tiles she had opted to use in the renovated Namekian vessel she, Krillin and Gohan had flown to Namek. They were barely recognisable. Along with the sloping white walls, the floor was dented and scoured with burn marks. Long, weaving cracks were lined with soot and a rusty-coloured substance Bulma didn't immediately recognise. Perhaps it was rust. Perhaps it was something to do with the stale-sweat stench that wreathed the place.

Perhaps it was blood. She lurched to her feet with a screech, dusting frantically at her clothes.

'What the hell do you want, Woman.'

It was a demand rather than a question, but it fell flat toward the end. She looked up sharply, forcing herself to forget about the red dust smeared on her palms. Vegeta stood a few strides away, shoulders back, arms crossed over his bare chest and black eyes narrowed, unsympathetic to her distress. Bulma raised her chin, treating him to her finest glare before pointedly ignoring him as her gaze swept the ship.

'Yamcha could be _hurt_ in here,' she said under her breath, less to him than to herself.

Vegeta snorted at the notion. 'Your scar-faced imbecile isn't here.'

At present, Bulma saw nothing to contradict him. The ship lacked any furniture; without moving she could see almost all the way around it. All that stood between her and a full search was the central pillar that housed the gravity simulator itself.

'He _was_ here last night,' she said, glancing over at Vegeta. 'Or someone was, but I'm pretty damn sure it was him.'

The saiyan shot her a dark look. He didn't hold her gaze for long: clearly the thought of someone else contaminating his equipment was intolerable, because he stalked to that central console, his fingers darting out and activating the main computer.

As Vegeta cycled through screens, Bulma sidled warily around, one hand clasped over her nose and mouth. She looked about for a scrap of orange gi or a fresh smear of blood. Secretly she expected to find Yamcha's body crumpled up on the floor behind the central pillar. But no, there was nothing. At the controls, Vegeta sneered.

'Perhaps he was here, but your pathetic excuse for a warrior failed to let off a single shot. The only ki residue in this ship is my own. Apparently the gravity was too much for him. Consider me unsurprised.' His gaze swept to Bulma. 'Now get out, unless you think you'll do any better.'

She met his gaze squarely. She had no idea what 'ki residue' entailed, but the thought of Yamcha failing to even summon his ki led her mind in dark directions. What if turning off the gravity and leaving the ship was all he could manage? Without his energy to protect him, he was surely no more pressure-resistant than the rest of the human race.

'Can you sense him?' she asked, forcing her tone to stay flat and civil. 'In the city, maybe, or training further out?'

Vegeta's lip curled into a snarl, his fists clenched. 'I am _not_ your bloodhound. Get out.'

And that was civility gone. She snarled right back. 'Oh, come on! It would be so _easy_ for you! Just two seconds of your time!'

He took a step toward her and stopped, scowling past her at the open door.

'Bulma dear!' Her mother's voice. 'I called around all your friends and that cute Yamcha is with that charming man Master Roshi on that little island of theirs – in fact, I have him on the line right now if you want to chat!'

Bulma turned around slowly. Her mother stood at the top of the ramp, balancing a tea tray on her hip, piled with waffles around a single glass of milk. She held up the house phone Bulma had abandoned in the kitchen. Puar floated at her shoulder, anxious as ever.

'I have some breakfast for you too, sweetie,' Mrs Briefs said to the fuming man at Bulma's back. 'I'll just leave that here for you.' She set it on the ground just inside the doorway and crooked a finger at her daughter, waving the phone. 'Come on now Bulma, let's not intrude on Vegeta's hard work.' She tittered. 'I'm sure Yamcha would love to chat.'

'Don't dawdle,' Vegeta said darkly under his breath.

'Like I'd want to spend any more time with you,' she hissed back as soon as her mother turned away.

Straight-backed, she stalked for the door. Spite was an ugly emotion, but that didn't stop her from planting a solid kick against the tray of food in passing, splashing milk over the waffles. The sudden departure of her panic had left her feeling mean.

'Enjoy your breakfast, ass,' she spat at him, before the rising door covered Vegeta's furious glare.

'Here you go, darling.' Mrs Briefs pushed the phone into her hands. 'I'm going to go get started on lunch, you two have a fabulous time!'

She planted a kiss on Puar's forehead before dancing away toward the house. The little cat eyed Bulma uncertainly.

'Is he okay?'

She nodded fiercely. 'No doubt. Give me a moment with him and I'll pass this along when I'm done.'

Puar didn't look entirely convinced, but held back as she stalked away across the grass.

'Yamcha,' Bulma hissed into the phone, her volume rising as the thrum of Capsule3 started up, eliminating the threat of eavesdroppers. 'Where are you?'

'Kame Island,' he said, 'just catching up with Krillin, seeing how his training's been going. What's the matter?'

'I know you used the gravity simulator,' she said. 'Do you have any idea how dangerous that thing is? You can't just swan in there all macho and turn it up to maximum, even _Vegeta_ had the wits to crank it up in stages, but not you, oh no, just go in there at night when no-one's going to find you so you can just bleed out in peace, right? That was the plan, right?' She drew a breath. 'I thought you were _hurt_. Why the hell didn't you check in to tell me where you were going?'

'Well, I-' Yamcha started, then continued more slowly, hesitantly. 'I just. I didn't think you'd care to know.'

She and he both fell silent then. The only sound on the line was their breathing: his prickly with static, hers a hollow echo through the handset.

'We need to talk.'

'I think maybe we should talk.'

They spoke simultaneously. Bulma rubbed her eye with her patched-up hand.

'I know you're probably having fun seeing everyone, but if you can come back right now-'

'Yeah. I'll be an hour or so – travel time. I'll see you then, Bulma.'

He hung up before she could reply, and Bulma was left standing on the lawn with the weighty white plastic telephone pressed to the side of her face. Slowly she lowered it, staring sightlessly at the house.

'Bulma?'

Puar flew over to her. His paw touched her shoulder.

'Sorry,' she said. 'He's gone. He'll be here in an hour.'

The little cat eyed her worriedly. 'He's definitely okay?'

'The gravity didn't crush him,' she said.

Bizarre, how that brilliant news left her feeling so hollow. Maybe it was the lack of sleep. Maybe it was her unnecessary set-to with Vegeta. Or perhaps she was just making excuses, avoiding the fact that her boyfriend of ten years felt she wouldn't care to know he was alive.

Suddenly her eyes were full of tears. She flung her arms around Puar. 'Everything's going so _badly_!'

He squeaked at first, but hugged her back as well as his short arms would allow, one paw stroking the side of her face. 'It'll be okay, Bulma,' he told her. 'You two can sort it out. Yamcha loves you very much.'

'I love him too,' she hiccoughed. 'But what if it's not enough? We're so _mean_ to each other!'

Puar had no reply for that. His paw fell still and he held onto her silently. She could hear the high-pitched pitter-patter of his heart beneath his delicate ribcage, and realised she hadn't heard Yamcha's strong, steady pulse in weeks. The last time they had slept together eluded her completely; she wasn't even sure where they had been.

The swish of the conservatory door prompted Puar to release her, and Bulma forced herself to focus on the house. Her mother had paused to wave, a wicker basket resting on one arm.

'Hey there,' she called over to them. 'I'm just going to the high street for special supplies, why don't you two settle down inside and I'll bring you something lovely to cheer you up, hmm?'

There was nothing to do about Yamcha but wait, and emotional exhaustion made Bulma as pliable as Puar. Obedience, for once, came naturally. Together they made their way to the living room, where Bulma sat on the armchair, the exhaustion of the night before once again rearing up. Puar perched on the arm of the sofa, out of reach.

'It probably won't take an hour, not really,' he said as Bulma picked up one of her mother's magazines, more for the comfort of something to hold than for meaningful reading matter.

'Probably not.' She smoothed the glossy cover of _Wonderful Women_. 'I can't believe he'd do that! Cranking up the gravity to three hundred. Tenshinhan maybe, Goku _definitely_, but Yamcha?' She let out an exasperated sigh. 'He's smarter than that.'

Puar sat with his head down, staring at the low table set between them. 'Yamcha wants to be strong just as much as they do,' he said. 'Everyone knows he's always been behind the others, but that won't stop him trying. The other day, when you told Muten Roshi that we shouldn't let ourselves be left behind, he really believed that, Bulma. And maybe playing catch-up is new to you, but it's not to him. He's always had to fight to keep up.' He glanced up, caught Bulma's stare and quickly looked away. 'I thought you would be the one who knew that.'

'I was never accusing him of slacking off,' Bulma said, but the conviction washed from her voice only halfway through the sentence. Puar only gave her a shadowed glance from beneath his furry brows.

Sickening, her heart heavy, Bulma opened the magazine and flicked through to the contents page. _Winning Good Men, How to Please Your Man, Relationships are an Art_: the list only worsened the further down she read. Restless now, she flicked through a litany of vapid articles without reading a thing.

'I have to go,' said Puar. Any anger or resentment she might have perceived in his tiny black eyes had vanished. All she had was his tone, and that seemed to have reverted to faintly concerned.

Bulma nodded. Whenever her mother opted to treat the family with food, she had a habit of presenting Puar with platters twice his size; it didn't surprise her that he had thought to escape as soon as he'd calmed down. 'Okay, Puar. Bye for now.'

_And thanks_, she meant to add, but the threat of clarifying exactly what she was thankful for warded her off. Instead she gave a stupid indoor wave.

'Bye, Bulma.'

He lifted off the sofa and flew swiftly through the door and out of sight. She stared after him for a while, but all she was really looking at was the blank wall, and that only allowed her brain to start chipping at her resolve about this talk. Everyone else was working hard to get ready for the androids, and here she was thinking about her relationship instead.

She looked back to the magazine and let out an exasperated sigh. There was no point in reading it, let alone flapping through the pages like this without absorbing a single thing. She set it aside. Her relationship with Yamcha was nothing like the one promised by magazine editors. It was bumpy and unsatisfying and, she had to just _admit it,_ reliant on him to make all the grand gestures. What could she say to get around that? How exactly was she going to justify patching things up again? She had never _been _in a relationship she had to work at; she had no way of knowing what might help.

Her body curved forward of its own will and her head came to rest against her injured hand.

'I wish there was something I could do,' she said aloud.

Her mother chose that moment to enter, but if she heard a thing Bulma had said she didn't advertise it. Upon looking up at her, Bulma could see the source of the distraction: she had a sizeable tray balanced on one hip.

'Bulma! I stopped by the bakery and _look _what I bought for us!'

She sashayed over to set the tray on the table, bringing with her the overpowering smell of sugar and cream. This had definitely been the sort of binge-buy that would have embarrassed Puar about his tiny appetite: cream slices loaded with jam and topped with thick white icing; cinnamon swirls still steaming slightly from their frilly paper cups; cupcakes with frosting piled too high to fit into anyone's mouth.

'Nice, huh?' said her mother, sitting down on the sofa with her hands clasped against her cheek. 'Don't these look scrumptious! Now, which one do you want?'

She would have demolished the lot on any other day. Today, however, the scent of cream cloyed in the back of her throat. The sight of jellied fruit made her stomach shift in protest. She lurched back against the seat cushion, trying to relieve the nausea, and barely had the presence of mind to raise her arms behind her head in an expression of nonchalance designed to stop her mother from inquiring.

'They're all yours, Mom, I'm not very hungry.'

Her mother blinked. 'What? But Bulma, what's wrong with you?' She paused for a moment, thinking. When she spoke again, her voice was a simper. 'Are you feeling lonely because all the boys are busy training and not spending time with you? That's it, isn't it, dear?'

That was enough to raise Bulma's hackles. Her stomach's objections fully taken on by her brain out of spite, she clenched her fists.

'Oh puh-lease! I'm just not very hungry!'

Her tirade would have gone on, had her father not joined them at that very moment. He looked as tired as she felt, an unlit cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth, his white lab coat hanging low on his shoulders. He stretched his arms over his head, yawning.

'You know,' he said without preamble, 'I'm starting to think Vegeta's a few cards short of a full deck. It wasn't enough to have the simulator create three hundred times normal gravity for him, now he's demanding that I make some more equipment for him to train with. And all he's going to do is break it!'

She thought of Yamcha, trying to prove his worth by incapacitating himself with the gravity simulator in the middle of the night with the very gravity level Vegeta now wanted to exceed.

'Somehow, that doesn't surprise me at all,' she said simply.

Her parents' banter, focused entirely on Vegeta, began to fade out of her awareness. Once upon a time, she reflected, she had known Yamcha had ambition. Back when he was a rugged desert bandit hell-bent on robbing them his aims and his efforts had been perfectly clear, and she had never doubted that determination of his through tournament after tournament. When, then, had his desires faded from her sphere of interest? When he took up baseball? Or was it when she realised there was a certain trend to all of Yamcha's fights: a certain losing trend. Perhaps, she thought sickly, some part of her had recognised the fact that he was falling behind, and dismissed his hard work as pointless.

But she'd wanted to help him. She'd wanted to augment his training rituals with all the tech he could ask for. Some part of her, the better part, had been loyal throughout. That meant they had hope, surely. She knew his mind now, she knew what he was working toward, just as clearly as when Puar had enlightened her before, about that one life-goal.

Her heart surged giddily and Bulma's eyes refocused on her parents.

'In my day,' her mother was saying, 'a man who showed that much dedication at anything was definitely husband material. A girl would have to be crazy to let him get away, I tell you!' She paused, then flushed. 'Oh my! What am I saying? I'm a married woman!'

Bulma's eyes widened at the words, her throat seizing. What were the chances that her mother would be talking about _that_ just as she was _thinking_ about _that_? Desperate to cover her blush, Bulma snatched up the nearest cream cake. It barely qualified as a cake at all; it looked more like cream in a paper cup, with a cherry on top to create some transparent _illusion_ of cake.

If she proposed to him now, would that be a transparent illusion of devotion? If they both knew they were in trouble, would marriage be some desperate last resort? She sat bolt-upright just thinking about it, her back stiff as a board, her nerves jittering under her skin. What if the problems kept on coming; what if their relationship relied on their breaks and their reunions; what if forever was too long a commitment? She loved him, though. She loved him, and in everything she had read, what they really needed was that love, and everything else would be easy.

Bulma's eyes filled with realisation for a split-second at best before cream cake took its place. It splattered up to her hairline. She didn't immediately register what had happened. For a moment all she could think about was dairy – was this whole cream or skimmed? – before the force of the shockwave and the word _earthquake_ rolled seamlessly into her brain. She dived beneath the coffee table.

Her parents weren't so quick. Her mother simply braced herself on the sofa, uttering her usual 'oh _my_.' Her father staggered with the force of the tremor, but even he apparently lacked the clarity of mind to duck, duck before the aftershock hit and the ceiling fell in or the light fixtures shattered or death, generally, occurred.

'Will you _get down_?' she shrieked, all thoughts of redemption through marriage lost in the wake of imminent demise.

'That was an explosion,' he said thoughtfully. 'You don't hear a boom like that from an earthquake, daughter.'

Bulma pawed cream from her face and slowly emerged from her hiding place on all fours.

'You think,' she started.

'I think it was most definitely the ship, yes,' he said, as calmly as he might state the score of the cricket.

'That poor man!' cried her mother.

Her parents were useless. For the second time that day, after a sleepless night and heavy workload, Bulma ran. She was breathless before she even reached the door outside, but the sight of Capsule3, its top half utterly shattered, the bottom on one side like the battered remains of an eggshell, smoke streaming from the demolished core of the gravity simulator, was enough to overcome all that. Rubble was strewn across the grass, torn and twisted scythes of metal ten centimetres thick scattered in a fifteen metre radius. She raced toward the centre of the blast.

'Bulma!'

It was Yamcha, dropping from the sky. She vaguely registered Puar floating up there, making no move to follow, but once again the threat of a corpse in the gravity simulator stopped her from truly caring about anything else. Offering Yamcha no response except a terrified glance, she kept running until the toe of her shoe met rubble.

'Vegeta!' she called.

The hope that he might appear at the sound of her voice, uninjured and arrogant as always, was weak and unconvincing. Her knees trembling, she sank to the floor beside the wreckage and stared at it in shock.

'I knew this would happen,' said Yamcha from right beside her. 'He's been trying to do the impossible.'

Swallowing, Bulma leant forward over the wreckage. She could see no scrap of clothing, no splatter of new blood.

'Where is he?' she said. 'Vegeta?'

There would be blood, if he was dead. She grasped onto that thought. With one hand she reached out and tugged at the nearest fragment of the capsule's broken wall. First Yamcha, now Vegeta. But Yamcha had proven to be okay, so there was every chance that-

A bloodied hand burst from the rubble right beside her. It didn't matter that any movement was unequivocally _good_, the sheer force behind it sent her toppling backward, slamming into Yamcha and bearing him to the ground. The grate of moving shrapnel forced her to sit back up, just in time to see Vegeta's head, shoulders and torso rise from the wreckage. His sharp features clenched, eyes shut, jaw locked. His entire body shook with the effort. Slowly he forced one eye open, then the other, and glared at Bulma and the warm presence right behind her.

'You're… okay?' she asked hesitantly.

Vegeta sneered. 'Of course I am.'

As if to prove the point his arms rippled and he pushed down against the uneven ground, slowly wrenching his lower body from the ruined ship. Pupils blown with effort, he forced himself to his feet and stood, half bent over. She stared at him, thinking of what she would do if she saw Krillin or Yamcha in such a state. But Vegeta wasn't either of them; he was tough as anything. A sigh of relief escaped her, before the small matter of the giant explosion raced into the gap.

'How dare you,' she snarled. 'You almost wrecked my house! What are you trying to prove?'

Clearly with every intention of making another of his damned snarky retorts, the saiyan straightened up, that signature smirk fixing his features, and gave a shaky laugh. Her temper sparked further at the sight of it – until he gave a surprised groan and collapsed bonelessly onto his back.

She raced forward across the wreckage, throwing out her arms for balance when a sheet of metal shifted under her weight. Quickly she crouched at his side. His earlier injuries had been nothing by comparison, old and half-healed, inconsequential in the first place. Blood slicked the broad planes of his chest, gathering in the gullies of deep scars. His face was no better off, scuffed and reddened with swelling burns along the line of one cheekbone.

'You're hurt!'

Bulma grasped his arm and pulled him toward her, supporting his back as best she could. He gave a pained grunt at the movement, his head tilting back as he looked up at her.

'No,' he said, 'I don't need help.' His words weakened, near-voiceless. 'I've got training to do.'

The thought of anyone so injured taking on her bots in high gravity made her stomach lurch.

'You've got to stop training for a while,' she said sharply. 'I mean look at you, you're a complete wreck!'

The saiyan who answered her barely sounded like Vegeta; his voice wavered with what almost sounded like confusion, as though the notion of sustaining a debilitating injury was past his comprehension.

'But I feel fine,' he said vaguely. 'I'm a saiyan! I can take a little pain, it means nothing to me… and I have to get stronger than Kakarrot.'

There was something about the bewilderment in his tone, the sight of someone so confident knocked completely out of his depth, the made her chest tighten. Right now, he did not seem like the impossibly durable being who had kept her friends at bay and infuriated a brute like Frieza. Suddenly aware that being conscious meant nothing for someone who might well have internal injuries, she clasped his shoulder ever-tighter.

'Okay,' she said with unusual softness. 'Sure. We all know you're a tough guy, but you need to rest now.'

His brows lowered at that, teeth baring. That was something, she thought. That meant he was fighting again.

'I take orders from no one!' he snarled, his muscles tensing against her as he lurched to his feet. He failed to even stand upright; his knees gave way beneath him, and he ploughed face-first into the ground.

She leant over him immediately, one hand running through his hair to find his jaw. Gently she tilted back his head, searching for some sign of consciousness, but this time Vegeta was out cold.

Jaw clenched with determination, Bulma hooked her arms under his, lacing her fingers over his chest, and heaved him upright again. Vegeta was pure muscle. Her bones felt like they might buckle as she lifted him, as though his sheer weight could break her arms. Choking for breath, barely able to see the ground around the wild spikes of his hair and his solid, blood-smeared, soot-streaked shoulder, Bulma staggered over chunks of glass and twisted shards of metal plating. She dragged him onto the grass, kicking at the rubble caught under his trailing legs and accidentally catching him in the calf. He gave a load groan, raw past the natural gruffness of his voice.

'Shit, I'm sorry,' she gasped.

His back was wet with sweat – what she hoped was just sweat – and it pressed through the loose weave of her orange dress. His skull ground painfully against her collarbone.

'I'm going to get you inside, I promise,' she forced out between her teeth.

But she couldn't move him another step. They were barely a metre from the toppled husk of the shattered capsule, so close the smoke billowing from the remains of the gravity simulator stung at her eyes, and that was all her human body could manage.

Orange flashed in her peripheral vision, past the obscuring plume of Vegeta's hair. Bulma looked up sharply. She had forgotten all about Yamcha; he had slipped out of her mind as soon as she saw the rubble, and done nothing to shoulder his way back in. Even now he stood motionless beside her, simply staring.

'Yamcha!'

He stirred as though coming out of deep sleep and she fought off the urge to smack him back to reality.

'Yamcha! Hurry up and help me with him!'

She tried to blow an escaped curl from her eyes as he continued to stare at the two of them, Vegeta near-lifeless on the grass and Bulma struggling not to drop him altogether. For once, she couldn't read the expression on his face.

'Come on!'

Finally, he stepped forward. His hand on her shoulder pushed her aside, and Bulma stood back, red-faced and breathless.

'Oh no!'

Bulma and Yamcha both looked up at the remarkable pitch Mrs Briefs had attained. She raced across the lawn toward them in her high wedges, wavering like a tightrope walker all the way, and fell into a crouch beside Vegeta before Yamcha could pick him up. Her hands hovered just short of touching the mangled saiyan.

'Darling,' she called back toward the house, 'you need to hurry!'

Dr Briefs emerged from the doorway walking backward, waving his hands as though directing traffic. One of the skinny medical droids skittered out after him, clutching the front of a stretcher in its thin hands, and another appeared supporting the end.

'Nearly there,' he said. 'Now, if you two younguns do the lifting, I believe this shouldn't be too much trouble.'

It wasn't, not with Yamcha's strength on their side, and the bots held Vegeta's weight well enough on the stretcher. Bulma was so caught up in her own thoughts that she barely registered the journey they made through the house. _What would it be like to actually beat Vegeta at his own game,_ she had wondered blithely days before. Now she knew. Half of her felt guilty about the part her bot designs might have played in his injury, the other part wanted to hit him around the head for blowing up the ship so close to her house.

A sudden groan as they passed her parents' room pushed both emotions aside in favour of concern: Vegeta's muscles bunched, expression contorting in pain, and his back lifted right off the white linen of the stretcher as his body arched in a passing spasm. Her hand darted out to touch his arm comfortingly almost on instinct. Painkillers. They had plenty of painkillers on-site and she would deliver them herself. The medical bots would do the best job of bandaging him up so she wouldn't interfere there, but anything else, anything that might alleviate this degree of suffering, she would do as best she could.

Caught up in her plans to help Vegeta back to health, she didn't realise whose hand suddenly clamped down on her shoulder until she had already pulled free.

'Bulma.'

It was Yamcha's voice, teamed with the reassuring sight of Vegeta's room just two doors away, that tugged her from her crisis mindset. Blinking, she stopped and stared at him. For a second she couldn't think of a thing to say.

'I didn't factor this into our talk-time,' she said when she could. She pawed unthinkingly at the front of her dress, found blood smeared on the side of her hand and craned her head back around just in time to see the stretcher and her parents disappear through Vegeta's door.

'I know,' said Yamcha, almost unnoticed. 'And I'm leaving.'

Her head snapped back around. 'What?'

'You've plenty on your plate already, Bulma. I have training to do, too. It's for the best.'

'For the best,' she echoed, fists clenching.

He was already sidling away from her, small steps lengthening into full strides as he backed toward the stairs, arms and shoulders raised in a defensive shrug.

'It is,' he said.

'Don't you dare.' She started after him, shaking with shock or exhaustion or sheer anger – did it really matter which? 'We still have a talk to go through, mister!'

Yamcha gave a rueful smile. 'It's not going to help,' he said.

'Bulma,' said her father from down the hall, 'I need you to help me set up this oxygen canister. They're really not made for old hands.'

Her head turned automatically to look at him, severing the sight of Yamcha for a few seconds at most. When she looked back, her boyfriend was gone, without a single word left behind to fix things. Her disbelief seemed to crystallise.

'Bastard son of a bitch,' she swore aloud.

Vaguely aware that she was half-gaping, she walked back to Vegeta's room, where her parents had tied an oxygen tube in a knot and Vegeta breath was gurgling in his chest. There was no way she could leave them like this, take her fastest jet plane and chase down her fleeing boyfriend. Somehow she knew he had counted on that being the case. Long ago, she had thought his scheming ways had washed out of him along with the desert sand of his bandit lifestyle, but after today his plot and his intentions were clear as anything. It made her want to shriek and cry all at once.

Instead, she stepped forward calmly, took the tubing off her perplexed father and eased out the knot. She set an oxygen mask over Vegeta's nose and mouth, beside the patch of gauze over his burnt cheek that her mother had speedily applied, and waited for his breathing to even out. His wounds had already been bandaged; there was nothing left to do.

'The only thing he hasn't bruised is his eyebrow,' she registered her father saying, and became aware that she had been the one to ask if the saiyan was going to be okay.

'Poor Vegeta,' her mother sniffled, and that was the last thing Bulma's mind managed to translate before her parents departed the room.

He'd run away. Her boyfriend of ten years had turned tail and fled a talk. A talk they both knew they needed. Just run. Just left her. He _never _left her.

Her eyes brimming with tears, she gazed down at Vegeta's bed, and felt herself smiling miserably. At least he was alive. And, if he rested up, he might even stay that way.

_Lunkhead_, she thought with remarkable, displaced affection, and turned to leave.

She stopped halfway to the door as he let out a muffled growl. Her ears strained in search of words.

'Kakarrot,' Vegeta ground out more distinctly. 'I'll… get stronger. I'll… I'll beat you.'

Slowly she turned, and found him tensing and twitching in bed, his face drawn tight in a shuddering grimace. His eyes were shut, but she could see his pupils moving beneath the lid. Vegeta was dreaming.

She wasn't sure how long she stared at him then. Her mind stayed utterly blank, blown clear from sheer exhaustion. All she was aware of was a sudden, almost overpowering surge of compassion for the man still fighting in his sleep. He had a desk at his bedside. With the toe of her shoe she hooked the nearest leg and slowly eased it out so she could sit. Settling her head on her arms, she gave him one last look before letting her eyes drift shut. All she needed right now – perhaps all he needed too – was silent companionship to ease in precious sleep.

* * *

Just to add - I take no credit for the scenes yoinked directly from the anime. And I'm aware I was kinda cheating on the 10k word goal with those scenes, but this is where they were always going to come in. Promise. D:


	8. The Warrior Pact

This chapter includes canon scenes from the Funimation translation of the Dragonball Z anime and the Viz translation of the Dragonball manga. I'm sorry it's so late, I'm in the middle of a move at the moment and lack a legal internet connection (take from that what you will re: my current state of law-breakage).

Actually, we're in the new house now so I'm not sure 'mid-move' is still accurate. To summarise: everything is full of boxes, and we only have lights in some rooms. Life involves a lot of toe-stubbing, cursing and wondering how to activate the internet without the internet to find the phone number to activate the internet. As such, I don't know when I'll next have 'net, most of my time is consumed by my role in the box vs. human conflict, and the deadline for the Blizzard writing contest is in October, so my next chapter may be delayed as well.

Of course, I told myself I was putting this fic on temporary hiatus until after the contest piece is done, and look what happened. So we'll see. At any rate, I hope y'all enjoy. There's a bit of a tone lurch in here because apparently shifting tone without a chapter break is a weakness of mine, but it is otherwise a-okay. xP

**ALL GOOD THINGS**  
by Obsidian Blade

**7.**

'A horrible monster comes when the moon is full, you know.'

Even with cold concrete beneath them, solid steel on all sides and shatterproof glass overhead, little Son Goku sounded certain, and not in the least bit scared. Dressed in someone else's loose linen desert garb, freezing cold in the dead of night, Bulma glared at him.

'What are we telling, campfire stories?'

It seemed like a stupid way to die, spouting superstition. Or it had done, when this had happened before – she was sure she had gone through this before, their capture in Pilaf's castle, without the strange dark gaps in her peripheral vision that faded out when she turned her head – but now the word _saiyan_ floated unbidden into her mind when she looked at the boy and everything seemed oddly logical. Of course a horrible monster would come. Of course.

'It's _true_,' said Goku. 'My grandpa died from bein' _stepped on_ by that monster!'

Yamcha had been in one of the dark spots of her mind until then, but suddenly his face, youthful and unscarred, was all Bulma could see. He was wide-eyed, disbelieving – beautiful, with his long, wild hair and his awful missing tooth.

'You're telling me it _smashed_ the legendary martial-arts master Son Gohan?'

Despite his surprise, his voice still had that accomplished-bandit smugness to it, that strength and certainty. She had been too scared to notice it before, waiting to burn in the heat when the sun finally rose, but this time the urge to kiss him, curtailed by a smothering sense of foreboding, brought her to tears. The others didn't seem to notice.

'An' my house!' said Goku. 'An' the trees! _Everything_!'

Oolong's voice swam out of no-where, though Bulma knew he was standing nearby with the results of her lost wish on his head: a pair of women's pants. 'What kind of monster was it?'

'I didn't see it,' said Goku. 'I was asleep. Grandpa used to say, "Never look at the full moon, boy." Only I don't see what me _lookin'_ at it could do…'

His voice started to distort; for a split-second she recalled Puar, moments earlier, looking up at the full moon overhead, enormous in the wide open sky and reflected three times over in the thick safety glass.

'I want to see something pretty before I die.'

Goku grew. His muscles thickened and darkened, a wave of thick brown fur sweeping over his body as he tore through his clothes. His lower jaw jutted out; his childish button nose sprouted into a colossal snout. His mouth split wide, full of sharp teeth, and the spikes of his hair drew together into a wild flame she fleetingly recognised. But it kept growing: long down his back, a sharp widow's peak striking down between his pointed ears.

Ten metres up, his shoulders rammed against the safety glass. The ceiling shattered, and as the night air blustered in his furious roar surged out. With glass raining down all around her, Bulma saw the flash of moonlight against the green, rectangular screen of a scouter over the beast's left eye.

And they were outside. Yamcha had her by the waist; he dragged Puar by his tail and Oolong by his ear as he vaulted over the shattered masonry of Emperor Pilaf's colossal palace and raced for the open desert. Maybe he had a car waiting somewhere, a hidden cave in mind; perhaps he felt he could outrun that thing, that monster Goku had suddenly become, temporarily caught up in the mindless destruction of every castellation and parapet in his ham-fisted reach; but Bulma could see no real place to hide, not when the only things for miles around were giant toadstools with stems too slim to conceal them.

Too late to turn back. She was kidding herself, anyway, if she really thought she could run _toward_ a monster that big, even if he was atop the one source of cover. If a legendary martial-arts master couldn't outdo him, she had no hope. So they ran. And made no ground. If anything they were going backward. She looked over her shoulder and saw dead red eyes urging them back toward him, drawing them in, until suddenly the sight was blocked by a flying parapet, hurtling through the air like a javelin. It smashed into her shoulder blades and bore her to the ground.

No pain. She couldn't even really feel the weight of the thing, but neither could she move. Ahead of her she saw Oolong, Puar and Yamcha dusting themselves off.

'That was close!'

Oolong snorted. 'That stupid Goku!'

As though innocent Goku's mind was really behind that towering ape. Yamcha seemed to recognise as much; he waved off Oolong's comment with a dismissive sweep of his hand.

'No point in chewing him out – we'd better get _away_ from here!'

She swallowed a sob she'd forgotten about, and called to the man who had confessed to her once – in her mother's conservatory? Between sips of lemonade? Or was it later, in the bustling crowds before the Tenka'ichi Budôkai, or later still, hidden away in the heart of the city by a building a wrecking ball had torn down just last week – that at that very moment he hadn't truly been on their side, he had joined them for the dragonball and a very important wish her very important smile had eventually eclipsed-

'Hey.' Her voice faltered, then strengthened. 'Hey!'

All three looked around for her, but it was his expression she recalled, it was his expression she immortalised in her memories, in this dream – because this was a dream, this had to be a dream, he wasn't going to look at her like that again, because she was a fool hypocrite and he hadn't thought she'd care to know he was alive. _In this dream_ he saw her trapped and his whole face shifted in horror, horror at the thought that she might be hurt. He was with her in seconds. His fingers dug into the grout between the bricks as he fought to lift them away. She fought too.

'Goku,' she screeched at the star-pricked sky, 'this isn't funny!'

They couldn't move the stone. Goku-turned-monster thundered toward them, bellowing, slavering. The ground leapt beneath them, but Yamcha wasn't running. At her side he turned to face the threat. For her sake he faced down a beast twenty metres tall, before he even really knew her.

She could feel the weight of the masonry now, pressing down against her back. Grating at her spine. All that stone, crushing her. Those bricks. That. That. The back of that.

Chair. Wooden chair. And damp carpet against her face. The pink fuzzy slippers her mother put in all the guest rooms pressed right up to her nose.

Bulma blinked groggily, making an unintelligible noise of confusion that filled her mouth with carpet. Spluttering, she tried to push herself up, but her legs were caught fast and she rolled haplessly onto her side. At least that got the weight off her shoulders. Her left shoulder blade ached, but she propped herself up on her elbows and glared down the length of her body, wiping drool, tears and carpet fluff from her cheek with a grimace. She must have tucked her ankles over the crossbar beneath the chair when she fell asleep: her feet were still caught on it. Grumbling, she pulled them free.

What a stupid bloody place to pass out. It didn't matter that Yamcha's face was crystal-clear in her mind in the wake of her dream: he was not worth this sort of pain. Her ankles, her shins, her knees, her hip, her shoulders, her spine, even her bloody _cheekbone_ ached. Her only consoling thought about this whole melodramatic act of stupidity was that Vegeta wasn't mocking her from his bed. Probably still knocked out.

A flash of concern led her gaze to the sheets hanging over the edge of the mattress above her. Even in the chaos earlier – fifteen hours earlier, her watch supplied – some part of her had latched onto the fact that he was _saiyan_, he would brush these wounds off. Even unconscious and dosed up on morphine, Vegeta had not looked helpless. Swathes of heavy scarring outlined the true purpose of his corded muscles, which flexed in aid of some imagined violence throughout the day. He snarled periodically beneath his oxygen mask, baring sharp canines. Just before she had fallen asleep at his bedside, Bulma had wondered vaguely if poking him in his sleep would earn her a black eye or a nasty bite mark. At any rate, she had expected to awaken to full-on malice, not prolonged unconsciousness. But the man lay still and silent, in a room with an open door, when he rarely rested at all. There was no doubt now: Vegeta was hurt badly.

Bulma stretched out her legs and began the arduous process of standing up. She'd give him an extra burst of the oxygen and see about procuring a saiyan-sized dinner from the kitchen. Hell, those months spent with Goku had taught her a fair amount about his alien physiology. As she recalled, Yamcha had Goku on the ropes the first time they met because the kid needed lunch. There was a high chance that if Vegeta wasn't recovering it was all down to hunger. Not extensive damage caused by machinery _she_ had helped to improve. She dusted herself off. It was just a hankering for soup. Her gazed dipped down.

The crux of this whole bizarre Vegeta-injured scenario did involve, of course, Vegeta actually being injured. Vegeta lying in this bed. This very empty bed.

For a moment, Bulma simply stared at the sheets, temporarily blind to the bloodstains and the oxygen canister wedged in behind the headboard. She hadn't dreamed up his accident too, had she? If she really had, then Yamcha might be downstairs, fresh from his training on the lawn. Her parents might not have had to saw through a plastic tube after demonstrating the natural Briefs family reaction to danger: panic and an unbending desire to shove their noses in it. After all, she could hear the whir of Capsule3 in the distance. After all, she could hear. She could.

That was too high-pitched to be Capsule bloody three.

In her father's lab, hair akimbo and fuzzy guest slippers thrust firmly on the wrong feet, Bulma powered on the video link to the inside of the older spaceship. The little screen beside the on switch read '300G'. She wanted to punch someone. Someone specific. She wanted to punch him _hard_, because he didn't seem to damn well _listen_ when she tried to be nice.

'Vegeta!' she yelled as soon as the communicator came online.

The saiyan revolved in mid-air on the viewscreen, the high gravity lending a nauseating flicker to his limbs. White bandage looped over his shoulder and across his chest, around his head and his one burned forearm. He wouldn't be ready to shed them for weeks, but the pressure was already peeling them back, baring blackened, bloody ribs and deep scrapes. Her heart leapt and her temper flashed.

'You are in _no_ condition to be doing this right now!'

He gave a warning snarl that came out even more terse than usual, but she scowled right back.

'I know you don't want to believe it,' she said, 'but you're made of _flesh_ and _blood!'_

Vegeta stopped at that, levitating upside down with murky sweat draining off him. 'Stop pestering me, woman,' he barked out, breathless. 'Leave me alone!'

The effort of speaking was too much. His eyes widened in recognition of the fact just before he plummeted to the ground, and she flinched as he hit the floor with a resounding thud. Again her mind looped back to her earlier musing – _what would it be like to beat Vegeta at his own game _– and she struggled to maintain the attitude. She couldn't have known what a grim sight it would be, a warrior of his strength pinned to the ground. Neither had she realised how much he _needed it_. He needed proof that this was outright promethean behaviour. He needed to know that he couldn't completely reject his own mortality in the belief that super saiyan invulnerability would simply sweep in and save him. Or whatever idiotic theory he'd conjured up to justify all this.

She fixed him with her haughtiest expression as he raised his head. 'You _know_ I'm right, so why don't you just keep quiet and do as I say?'

Muscles strained all down his bare back, reopening a few smaller cuts and streaking his ribs with blood, but what she presumed was an attempt to stand got him no-where. The urge to hit him was back, though her hands were shaking now, thankfully out of his sight. Didn't he realise how much all this masochistic behaviour scared _her_? He might be used to letting his pride use him as a punching bag, but damned if she wanted to watch it. She plastered a smirk on her face, internally thumbing through her repertoire of insults for further bait. If he really wanted to kill her he'd try to stand again – and when he failed, he'd have to accept she was ultimately _right._

'Nothing to say? Well, that's good. Now go back to bed and get some rest!'

'Not yet.'

She barely heard him. His voice was gruffer than ever.

'I do have something to say.'

A flicker of indecision crossed her face.

'What, is something wrong?'

If taunting him had made his wounds worse – if this tactic proved even more damaging than pity – if she really had screwed up just now, then…

She turned up her nose. 'Or maybe you're finally going to apologise to me! If that's the case, then let's hear it!'

Vegeta drew in a colossal breath.

'Leave. Me. ALONE!'

It was such an uninspired retort, so lacking in any of his usual wit, that she should have shrugged it off. She would have, in fact, if not for the sudden intrusion of a wheedling voice in the back of her head. _That's what Yamcha said, too._ In different words, more haltingly, yes, but still the same thing. Essentially _I'm leaving_ had meant _I want to be away from you._

Her face felt numb. She must have been gaping at Vegeta through the viewscreen; she must have looked like he'd broken her heart with a stupid, bland, pathetic handful of words. Not that his face showed any sign of victory. No, he maintained the furious snarl for a half-second longer before slumping back down onto the simulator floor, his face hidden by his hair, his back heaving bloodily for breath. She fumbled for the off-switch.

With the screen dead, her father's office stood in grey shadows. She had frequently wondered why he had chosen to set up on this side of the building, the side the sun never reached, but this was the first time she had openly wished he'd changed his mind. She slipped from his threadbare chair, grazing her shoulder on the harsh edge of his metal desk, and hunkered down on the thin acrylic carpet. Everything was lifeless and grey all around her. Even her skin, ever luminous, looked pale and wan in the shade.

She hugged her knees. What she really needed, and what this lifeless room made no attempt to deny her, was a good, long cry.

Hours later, she couldn't quite say what got her from the floor of her father's office to the out-dated gravity machine's door, a tray across her arms. Exhaustion, she guessed, and possibly guilt. After her tears gave out the memory of his injuries crept in, and the sight of blood running down his back had her regretting every barb she'd thrown his way. Bulma Briefs was not big on regrets.

Her mother, of course, could shoulder the most of the blame. She had shoved the tray into Bulma's arms, weighed down with a saiyan-sized snack, and pushed her toward the door.

'He won't get better if he doesn't eat, dear,' she'd said.

Having come to the same conclusion earlier in the day, Bulma found she could hardly disagree.

So now, on the lawn, with her makeup all gone and her shoulders slouched, she rapped on the door with her knuckles. They gave three hollow metal bangs.

'Vegeta! Food!'

No reply. The generator itself had been shut off for a while, but she knew he was still in there, alive enough to move around. The lights were still on inside, and she'd seen his silhouette through the red glass windows while her mother loaded up the tray.

With a sigh, she sat heavily against the door, the tray sagging against her knees, and looked up at the sky. Clouds cloaked the stars. Yawning, Bulma knocked thrice more with the back of her head. Thanks to the perm, each impact barely made a noise.

'Come _on_. I'm tired.'

Perfect silence. Hell, she wouldn't be surprised if he was leaning against the control panel, still as stone, listening for her departure. Then again, she wasn't sure the haughty prince of saiyans had that sort of patience.

'Hey,' she said, 'I'm sorry about earlier.' A long pause yielded no results, so she pressed on. 'I probably shouldn't have harassed you. Alright, you're out of your mind, but that's fine by me. You do what you want. Just make sure you don't blow up my house, okay? And you better not let _my_ robots be the ones to finish you off, either.' She yawned again. 'That'd be horrible.'

The door clicked. Sleepy as she was, it didn't immediately occur to Bulma what was going on, until the wall she was leaning on pushed against her back and kept going. With a shriek, she scrambled out of the way, spilling cranberry juice across the grass and barely saving the food. The ramp thudded into place against the ground.

'Vegeta!' she stormed up at the flame-haired figure in the doorway, rendered featureless by the light streaming out around him. 'You nearly _crushed me_ with that, buster!'

'Then it was a damn stupid place to sit,' he said.

There was a moment's silence in which her eyes adapted enough to see him staring at her with a frown on his face.

'What is that?' He jerked his head in the direction of the tray.

She sniffed at the foil covering. 'Uh, casserole. Beef? I dunno, but Mom made it, so it'll taste amazing no matter what it is.'

He held out a hand pointedly. With a roll of her eyes at his spartan grasp of manners, Bulma passed across the tray of food.

'Okay. Enjoy.' She stood up, brushing grass from her dress. 'I'm getting some proper sleep. _Bed_ sleep.'

'Woman,' he said before she'd taken a single step back toward the house.

She brushed back a coil of her perm. 'What's up?'

'It almost makes you _more_ pathetic.'

She stared blankly. Vegeta sounded as tired as she felt. Perhaps that was why his words failed to rile her, even though he'd used his favourite insult.

'Huh?'

He glanced fleetingly to one side. 'You know what I mean.'

'Oh, _come on_, Vegeta.' She crossed her arms. 'I'm not playing _that_ game with you.'

His eyes swept back to her, and she saw his lip curl as much as his injured face would allow.

'For a woman looking to fight, through that bucket of bolts machine or otherwise, you care a damn slight too much about what injuries you might cause your enemy.'

She tilted her head to the side, peering up at him as she tried to make sense of a single word. Clearly she'd reached a new level of exhaustion, if her wonder brain wasn't instantly throwing out answers. Injuries she'd caused, those would have to be-

'Is this about me falling asleep by your bed?'

Vegeta glared, and something that looked distinctly like a blush crept over his sharp features. So it _was_ that.

'Oh, come on. You're not my enemy.'

He scoffed. '_That_ idiotic assumption is an entirely different sector of your lunacy, woman, and not one I'm willing to waste my night discussing.'

She felt the slightest hint of a smile cross her lips. For the first time all day, playfulness crept into her tone. 'But you _are_ willing to discuss me by your bed…'

Vegeta flamed red. 'Shut up,' he snapped. 'Vulgar woman, don't you have _anything else_ in that damn pinhead brain of yours?'

She fluffed her perm. 'Well _obviously_, or we wouldn't be having this conversation, would we? Come on, Vegeta, what are you getting at here, huh? This is, what, the first time you've willingly spoken to me, so I'm guessing you have a killer game plan laid out. Just go for it already.'

He shifted the tray against his flank, glaring at her venomously until the plastic edge tugged at a bandage and elicited a red-faced wince. 'Put whatever battle program you're making for that suit into the droids and send them to me,' he said, steel strength back in his voice.

'But.' She blinked, swallowing, and the good humour fled her completely. 'Hey, that thing's going to be shooting to kill, you know.'

'Of course I know. That's the _point_. You were there when I dealt with Zarbon, you must remember what I said.'

Her mind harked back to planet Namek, the place she'd mostly tried to blank from her memory. Past endless scenes of dog-eared magazines and hours spent staring at the same dull rock, sky and sand she sought out that one petrifying moment, when Vegeta had dropped from the sky with Frieza's top henchman not a moment behind him.

'Saiyans get stronger with injury,' she said slowly. 'That was the gist of it, right?'

Vegeta gave a sharp nod. 'Now do you understand?'

She scowled. 'I think I've got it, yeah. But guess what, buddy? There's no way I'm helping you blow up that ship on a daily basis! Firstly, those things cost millions, you know! And secondly, my house! You are _forbidden_ to blow up the house! And thirdly, thirdly-'

'Will you _shut up_!'

Her mouth snapped shut, though she willed the words _my house_ at him through her eyes.

'I have no damned intention of wasting ships,' Vegeta continued. The tray gave an ominous creak under his arm, and his muscles flexed as he made what had to be a considered effort to avoid crushing his after-dinner snack. 'What I want is the best training gear I can get, and your doddering father wouldn't know a killing instinct if it had him by the throat. Now, presumably _you_ intend to develop that edge if you want to fight the androids, and that means _you_ will soon have the program _I_ need to train.'

'…So this has nothing to do with blowing up poor Capsule3…'

'If it wasn't for your droids _poor Capsule3_ would still be around,' said Vegeta. 'That's it. Now swear to me you'll pass along the damned software. It would be to your benefit almost as much as mine, if you'd anything like my potential.'

'Hey, I have _plenty_ of potential, thank you very much.'

Her mind whirled, upset by the clear signs of his injury – the bandages, the breathlessness, the metallic scent a girl like her really shouldn't recognise so readily – and the bizarre juxtaposition of her mother's stew, wafting comforting homely scents at her from beneath a foil wrapper. She'd planned something like this when she'd decided to try out different materials for the ship's hull through Vegeta's training bots, so logically it wasn't such a leap to subject him to her android-slaying program. Well, logically it wasn't such a leap until she remembered that the materials were purely _defensive,_ while the programming would venture into the _aggressive._ God, the lurch of her stomach when she saw Vegeta in the wreckage was not something she was ready to face again.

He'd pointed that out just minutes before, though, she realised. _You care too much about your enemy_, or something to that general tune. An android would be all wires and circuitry, of course, but they would look like flesh and blood. Could she really fire at a human face? Could she shoot to kill what was, at least externally, a living being?

She focused on the man standing in front of her. Until fairly recently, Vegeta had been the worst of the worst. Honestly, she'd been so badly informed on Namek that she'd thought he was enemy number one until well after the others had transferred their fear to Frieza. And alright, okay, she had plenty of experience when it came to accepting the transition of a baddy to a best bud, but he was still a bad-tempered bully half the time. She didn't exactly like him. But she had still leapt to his side when he was injured. She'd still worried 'til her stomach ached. What if she felt the same way when her suit inevitably struck a killing blow in three years' time?

This was a way to wean herself off instinctual tenderness. If she learned to set her masterpiece software on Vegeta, she had no doubts she would be able to carve up a couple of androids. After all, her altruism tended to cut out as soon as her own life was on the line, so she would almost certainly be okay if they were focusing fire on her. The trick was to make sure she would fight just as hard when her friends were the ones taking the hits.

'Okay,' she said, 'you can have whatever I come up with. But here's the deal.' At the disapproving line of Vegeta's brow, she put her hands on her hips. '_Here's the deal_. If there are defects because I'm putting something meant for a suit with four limbs into something with none, that's too bad. If a bot blows a hole in your face, that's _too bad._ If you blow up my house, the deal is _off_. And if you make it to super saiyan using my equipment…' She cocked her head to the side. 'I want a high five.'

'My ascension is guaranteed,' Vegeta said. 'The most your droids will do is speed things up. So you _will not_ get your pointless "high five".'

'"Whatever the hell that might be?"' she supplied. 'No, in all seriousness, that was a joke. Lighten up! The rest stands, though.' She wagged a pointer finger at him. 'Especially the house part.'

He eyed her for a second, before scoffing. 'If it will stop your pointless blathering, fine. Your terms are acceptable, on the condition that the bots are kept in working order at all times.'

'How about the bots are fixed ASAP when you bust them? We can't just magic them back together when they're broken, so "at all times" isn't exactly something we can handle.'

'Huh. If that's the best you can manage.' The prince gave a derogatory shrug that Bulma hoped hurt. 'I'll make do.'

She poked out her tongue. 'I'll try and make do with you as my only alpha tester, then!'

'Woman,' he said in the midst of turning back into the ship, his hand already on the door console, 'you could find no better.'

The door raised up and clanked shut behind him, and for a moment Bulma found herself staring at the armoured metal, a slight smirk on her face, a welcome warmth in her belly. The nerve of him. The brilliantly distracting _nerve._ In one short exchange, he'd presented her with a challenge, a solution, and a break from the emotional onslaught of the day. A bit of eye-rolling at his ego was a fine replacement for further upset over Yamcha. To hell with it. She'd let him have that last word. On the house.


	9. Notes for a Superior Product

Short update while I work on yet another slow-progressing monster chapter...

* * *

**ALL GOOD THINGS  
**by Obsidian Blade

**8.**

Her amusement with Vegeta barely lasted through the first night, but over the subsequent weeks depression hadn't a hope in hell of slowing Bulma down. It didn't matter that the grey of her father's office never quite seemed to let her go. It didn't matter that she woke each morning to reddened eyes and smothering exhaustion. For the next month, Bulma ploughed through programming with every degree of intensity her coffee-fuelled body could maintain. Her father, mother and, most astonishingly, Vegeta checked in on her from time to time to find her unerringly hunched over her work in an engineering frenzy, though the prince's visits, always clipped and businesslike, stopped altogether when he happened upon one of her teary moods.

'That Yamcha,' she had bawled at him before he had a second to make his usual inquiry after the bots, 'doesn't have a clue how I _feel_.'

Vegeta had turned sharply on his heel, a muscle twitching under his eye, and disappeared for the better part of three weeks.

Her temper had never been the only aspect of her personality on a hair-trigger. Bulma had noticed early on in her life that she functioned as though her moods sat on an ever-moving turntable, where upset, rage, empathy and happiness filtered through her present state of determination.

Right now, her ambition bordered on fanaticism and her moods surged and plummeted at the slightest provocation. New lines of code raced across her screen even as she cursed Yamcha's name, sobbed over his disappearance and wondered desperately if he was okay. At first she hadn't wanted to admit it but, as all her previous achievements steadily lost their gleam in her shrouded mind's eye, the software had come to support a sizeable portion of her self-esteem.

She had sent a droid with her prototype installed to the new and improved Capsule3 through her father a few days before. For the rest of that evening work had been impossible. She strode from wall to wall, chewing through her polished nails, struck stupid by the hitherto unfelt threat of her own incompetence.

When her pacing brought her to exhaustion, she lay in her bedroom with the balcony doors thrown wide and listened to the crash and crackle of Vegeta's ki in the ship down below. Slowly, the whir of the simulator and the rhythmic sound of the saiyan's workout had eased her back to some sort of sanity.

Vegeta would be harsh. She couldn't get around that. Vegeta would be harsh for at least three reasons: he was Vegeta; his training always left him grouchy; and her program was still in its earliest phase of development. There was no point in fearing the inevitable. There was no point in hating herself for an imperfect first try.

For no discernable reason, she still cried herself to sleep.

The following morning had proved no kinder. Until two in the afternoon she lay on her back in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. Her mother's words through the door – _Bulma dear, I've brought you some nibbles_ – had elicited a barked dismissal through chapped lips, but the coffee she found on a tray outside did the trick. By the late afternoon, she was back at the keyboard, and the code was ever-growing.

Four days later, the software she had sent to Vegeta was already an outdated relic as far as she was concerned. The newer release was still simple, in Bulma's terms. She had nearly three years to perfect it; there was no point in swamping herself with features before she'd built up the core functions. This early script was intended to recognise and remember patterns in enemy movement, from the frequency of ki blasts to general starting stances. Her friends had uncanny sixth senses when it came to predicting moves; she needed her suit to do that for her.

Of course, recognising moves required advanced video input capabilities. Her program needed to be able to identify different parts of the anatomy. It needed to comprehend three-dimensional space. It needed to calculate the speed of an object moving in any direction at any angle – and consider the potential breaking speed too, in case of an enemy feint. The model currently doing its rounds in the new and improved Capsule3 could just about manage a few of these things, but the newer version would do so infinitely better.

As she sat back in her padded typist's chair, watching her code compile, the lure of the telephone receiver sitting right beside her computer steadily increased. Slowly, she let her gaze trickle over to it. It wouldn't be such a crime to call Yamcha. Without him bumming around the house between training sessions, Bulma had to admit she'd fallen into the incommunicative stupor that seemed to grip all her friends between major disasters. She hadn't spoken properly with _anyone_ in days. _Weeks._ And he was her _boyfriend._

Her hand clamped down on the white plastic handset and lifted it to the side of her head. In a moment of hesitation her breath passed through the mouthpiece and back out into her ear, dislocated and distant. _We need to talk_, Yamcha had said, a mere moment after she heard that sound last. Her eyes darkened. She punched in a number.

It rang fourteen times before there was a click on the other end, then a thud and clatter. She rolled her eyes and waited as moving air whispered back along the line to her: the distinctive sound of a phone swinging on the end of its cord. Another moment, another thud, and then a ponderous voice through the line.

'Bulma?'

'Hi Dad. Could you do me a favour and tell Vegeta I finished the new droid upgrades?'

'Oh ho.' She could hear him smile. 'That was quick.'

'You know how it is. Once the basics are down, the rest is easy.'

'When you work nineteen hour days, I'm sure that's the case. It gets a little more difficult when you're my age, I'm afraid.' He paused, and she heard the click of his lighter. 'What was that about telling Vegeta?'

'Just let him know I've got the upgrade ready, Dad. He's probably bored with the first one by now.' She paused, struck by the need for a longer talk, face to face. 'Hey, I think I might actually come to dinner tonight.'

'You'd have a hard time, dear. You do have a clock in there with you, mm?'

'Well yeah, but-' She glanced at the number in the bottom corner of her screen, on the verge of clicking back into triple digits, and gaped. 'What? When did it get so _late?_'

Her father chuckled. 'About the same time as always, Daughter. Perhaps you can enjoy your mother's hard work tomorrow, hmm? I'm off to bed. Once I relay this important message of yours, of course.'

She let out a long breath, surprised by her own disappointment. 'Alright, Dad. Sleep well.'

With the phone back on its hook, the laboratory sank back into twilight silence, with only the muted bluster of her computer fan to break it. She couldn't bear more than a few seconds. Jumping up, she paused only to consider and dismiss a quick note to leave on her door. If Vegeta wanted the upgrade right away, he'd just follow her energy signal.

Clearly he wasn't that eager, however, because Bulma was back at her seat with depleted plates of noodles, chicken and crackers spread out on her desk by the time she heard footsteps in the corridor, too distinct to be her father's, too strident to belong to her mother. Trying not to grin too widely with relief at the promise of human – well, not-so-human – interaction, she looked up from her takeaway just as Vegeta strode into her lab toward her. The battered shell of her specialised bot clattered onto her desk from his hand. It bounced and rolled, droplets of oil flecking the last piece of her chicken.

'Hey,' she said around a mouthful of noodles, 'that's my dinner you're defiling, lunkhead.'

'Your program is a disgrace,' said Vegeta, crossing his arms and glaring down at her. 'Any opponent will destroy you in seconds.'

Thank god for the noodles, they kept her from beaming like an idiot. Bulma Briefs: not only a technological genius and a dab hand with a spanner, but a regular modern-day Cassandra. Somehow it eased the blow of producing something less than perfect, predicting this outcome from the start. She'd actually expected more of a rant from him, but the general disapproval was there in force.

She drew a pad of paper across the desk toward her and licked sauce from her fingers until she was clean enough to handle a pen. This was probably, she stopped to realise, the only time she had ever smiled at an insult.

'Okay,' she said, readying the pen. 'What was wrong with it?'

Vegeta's gaze bit into the page with disdain. 'More than you could fit on that.'

'Yeah, if you gave me every last detail, which I'm willing to bet you won't.' She fished a prawn cracker from a plastic bag and twirled it between two fingers, peering up at him. 'Try and be a bit more specific for me?'

He looked about as willing to be useful as a brick wall on a runway, all furrowed brow and dispassionate black eyes, but he hadn't the malicious set to his lips she'd witnessed before. The evil, for the moment, appeared to have been drained out of him, washed away by the same shower that left him standing before her without his usual crust of blood, smelling faintly of almond shampoo.

'Hm.' She tapped her bottom lip with her pen before chewing through the cracker. 'How was it for... reaction time?'

'Slow.' It came out almost like a grunt. He was probably wondering if he was going to indulge her with this little interview at all. It hadn't escaped Bulma that their deal didn't specifically require him to give detailed feedback. She was just about to try and prompt him further when he cut her off. 'It grew faster over time, but only a fool would expect something so sluggish to last that long in a real fight.'

'A real fight, huh.' She smiled. 'Been going easy on my baby, huh?'

He scowled. 'It may surprise you to know that your inferior equipment is more useful whole than as rubble.' Again he cut her off when she opened her mouth to protest. 'Besides, one of your idiot rules was the preservation of this building. If I went all-out there would be no house.' He folded his arms. 'No city.'

'No planet?' She blinked at him brightly, before thrusting her hand into the sack of crackers and offering him a few. 'Hungry?' When he simply glared, she stuffed the lot in her mouth and swallowed. 'Suit yourself. You can sit down too, you know.'

He glanced down the length of the workbench. 'On what?'

She stood from her own plush chair and peered over her computer monitor. The aisle on the other side was empty from wall to wall.

'Oh shoot. Let me find you one.'

She hopped up and glanced around, spying a stack of stools in the corner where her mother had left them. With a grunt, she pulled one free and turned to carry it back, only to stagger to a halt. Vegeta was settled quite comfortably in her own chair, one leg crossed over his knee, his elbows resting loosely on the arm rests. She hadn't seen him so relaxed for the duration of his stay – which undoubtedly meant it was an act concocted for the sole purpose of riling her. She rolled her eyes.

'That's how it's gonna be, huh?'

As she plonked the stool beside him and clambered onto it, he glanced at her. Seen from a full foot above him, the shadows under his eyes resembled black, mottled bruises. There was a definite glassiness to his pupils, and when he blinked at her the movement was slow and drawn out. It occurred to her that he might well have just come from one of his fifty-six hour training sessions: focused on her work, she hadn't paid his ever-bizarre, ever-masochistic sleeping patterns a moment's heed for the past four weeks.

'Congratulate yourself,' he said. 'You actually found something in this pigsty.'

She smiled prettily. 'And you get the added bonus of sitting right where my gorgeous girly bum was just seconds before.' She winked. '_Score_, Vegeta.'

He turned his head away with a sound of disgust.

'You're such a prude,' she said, snagging her pen and paper.

'A classless creature like you _would_ think that.' He scowled.

'Hey, I am a classy lady. Only classy ladies look this good.' She tapped the blank page. 'Let's give me _something_ to work with.' She glanced fleetingly at the remains of her dinner. 'And if you want any of that, help yourself. I need to keep an eye on my figure, you know.'

He gave her the scornful, slightly perplexed look she was starting to recognise as his typical response to human vernacular and made no attempt to reassure her as Yamcha would have. Her leftovers, too, went untouched.

'The damn thing's reaction time is almost a secondary concern. It insists on responding incorrectly,' he said instead, and pushed on with the facts.

As she took notes and posed the occasional question, Bulma became aware of her earlier intensity slipping away altogether, the same intensity that had protected her for weeks. The mere thought of it sent a shot of upset through her guts. Why did he go, what did I do,_ who does he think he is?_

It didn't last. Vegeta was so unlike casual, warm, charming, yellow-bellied Yamcha that she couldn't keep her boyfriend in mind while she focused on her housemate's words. There wasn't a shred of familiarity or friendliness in Vegeta's demeanour. His delivery was concise, almost military, and he glowered at her whenever she fell behind and begged a moment's silence for catch-up. She wondered about excusing herself to snag the dictaphone she'd left on the back desk, but somehow she doubted Vegeta would concede to its use. There was something transient about him. Nothing he did suggested any desire to belong anywhere. Recording his voice would be too permanent. She wasn't sure _she_ could allow it.

She blinked and realised her pen had stopped moving, leaving a pool of blue ink on the page. Vegeta was talking about the bot's limited capacity to dodge – _only a fool would feint left every time_ – and she wasn't sure how much she'd missed.

'Hey, Vegeta. Could you say that again?'

'No.' He stood and cast her a disapproving look.

'But I need information to improve the code,' she started, before a glance down at the notebook revealed just how much she already had to work with.

'You've had enough of my time.'

'Huh.' She flicked through the pages. There were only three sides of A4, but each line was packed full with her own narrow script. 'I guess I have. Sorry, Mother's genes showing through.'

She looked up to find him already halfway to the doorway.

'Hey!' She snatched up the newer droid and ran after him, brandishing it in front of her. 'Vegeta! You forgot this.'

He paused in the hallway and gave her a withering glance.

'Where do you expect me to put that?'

Capsule3, she had meant to say, but logic stopped her short. The exhaustion, the shower, the replacement of his training shorts with the navy flannel trousers Bulma had only just noticed: it actually looked like Vegeta might spend the night _inside_ the house for once. Walking the droid to the ship sounded like the sort of detour the prince _could_ make in a split-second, but would shun in favour of belittling stares and the odd mutter about servant duties.

So she shrugged. 'Bedside table. Hey!' Her eyes lit up. 'I could install an _alarm clock_ in these babies, that'd be useful. For waking up – that's obvious – but timing things too. Dinner, exercises, those brilliant showers you take monthly-'

As far as her silly human eyes could make out, the bot teleported from her arms to Vegeta's hand. He gave her a glare that, with minimal amplification, would likely cut through steel.

'Earth joke,' she clarified. 'We do a lot of friendly ribbing.'

'I am not,' he spat, 'your _friend_.'

'Oh, I know.' She smiled at him, deepening his scowl, and turned to head back into the laboratory. 'Sadly for you, _I_ tease friend and foe alike.'

'Huh.'

He exhaled the word scornfully. The next thing she knew, his departing footsteps left her once again in stifling silence.

For a moment she stood on the threshold and looked out over the benches and workroom detritus, past the blue haze surrounding her computer screen to the dark skeleton of her combat suit against the far wall. Four weeks working herself to the bone in this long room, and she hadn't looked around in all that time.

Steadily, she exhaled, closed her eyes for three slow beats of her heart, and started a lap around the various switches, turning off lights and downloads. Beside her computer, she picked up a trailing cable and carried it over to the suit. It pushed easily into the side. Behind her, the computer gave an acknowledging beep. Bulma set her hands on her hips and grinned. If talking with an antisocial prick like Vegeta could pick up her mood this well, who knew what a proper conversation with a fully-functioning human being would do. Tomorrow, she was going _out_.

She left the room in darkness, save for the low gleam of the progress bar on her computer screen.


End file.
